Membership
Membership on the committee is voluntary and the committee recruits members with diverse representation across roles (e.g., principal investigators, information managers, education and outreach coordinators, site-level communicators, and students) and site geography. Co-chairs are elected every 3 years.
Meeting frequency
The committee meets every other month via video conference.
Major activities or accomplishments for 2018-2019
- Support the “LTER Stories” special issue of Ecosphere
- Member Peter Groffman convened manuscript authorship
- Member Julie Doll is guest editor for special issue
- Multiple members are internal reviewers for manuscripts
- Long-term goal is to build a community of practice for site communicators and others interested in science communication across the Network.
- 2019 action item: in collaboration with Diversity Committee and Higher Ed Working Group, facilitated 2 LTER-wide calls on communication and diversity issues in REU programming
- Worked with NCO and NSF to amplify/populate from the site level multiple LTER multimedia campaigns (e.g. Earth Day Story Map project, #LTERlove, #WhyISynthesize)
- ASM 2018
- Led committee meeting (recruited multiple new members)
- Supported cohort of REUs at ASM
- With Higher Education Working Group, co-organized two preparatory webinars for REUs attending the meeting (an overview of LTER, and a session on how to communicate well with scientific posters)
- Created & led Arthur C. Schwarzschild student poster contest, with a focus on science communication; worked with ESA to donate student annual memberships as prizes
Planned activities for the coming year
- For the special edition of Ecosphere:
- Contribute reviews of manuscripts
- Work with NCO and NSF to publicize manuscripts’ story points for broad audiences with media outreach, partner outreach, and social media
- To build the LTER community of practice in communication
- Organize a “book club”-like viewing and discussion of the LTER site applications of a scicomm professional development topic (e.g. from the Sackler Colloquium)
- Work with Higher Ed working group to plan a summer 2019 virtual session (giving an overview of the LTER Network) for REUs at LTER sites
- Work with NCO to amplify outcomes/products from 2018-2019 synthesis working groups
- Contribute as needed to 40-year review
- If leveraged funding can be obtained: create & distribute calendar of LTER imagery for LTER community, funders, and stakeholders
