The 2026 LTER strategic plan clarifies the types of science which take best advantage of LTER’s assets and approach. But developing the next generation of LTER science demands the involvement of the whole LTER+ community.
We invite researchers and students—inside and outside the Network—to help brainstorm and shape specific projects that address elements of the strategic plan. Timing is ideal for developing follow-on proposals to the current synthesis opportunity (due September 16, 2026).
Do you:
- Have an idea for synthesizing research across sites?
- Interested in bringing skills to a synthesis project, but not sure how to connect?
- Wanting to collaborate with the LTER Network, but unsure what shape that might take?
- Curious about Network-level science, partnerships and support?
After a brief introduction, most of the session will be spent in facilitated small groups for discussion of project ideas. Four breakout groups are planned, with additional groups possible on request. The proposed initial topics are quite broad. We envision discussions zeroing in on specific, tractable projects.
1) Driver-response relationships under novel environmental conditions and new ecosystem states: Identify consistent driver-response relationships across sites and develop hypotheses based on shared mechanistic understanding of how sites may respond to novel environmental conditions.
2) Motivating research framework: Develop a research framework that can motivate new research questions by incorporating mechanistic understanding of the conditions that shape ecosystem processes yet allowing for surprises such as new organisms (e,g, new species), disturbances, evolution, or climatic extremes that change the “rules of the game.”
3) The path forward with AI. Probe how AI and knowledge-guided machine learning could be used to accelerate synthesis, including testing and assessing the use of AI to construct synthesis datasets. Explore the potential for using existing LTER data for training domain-specific AI models.
4) Science to Management. Many LTER sites address important resource management questions in their specific systems and there are also common threads across sites, such as: intercalibration and standardization; restoration approaches; testing new techniques; targeting efforts and establishing scales of variability; developing new detection and monitoring technology.
