2024 LTER Year in Review: Generating Momentum

At the core of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network is a long-term view. Not just of the ecosystems we study, but of the people and institutions that study them, too. This year, our actions at the LTER Network Office (LNO) sowed seeds for the future of our network. We invested in our own people, in our science, and in our ability to impact others. The result is momentum we hope will carry into the next decade.

Core to this momentum is that funding for the LTER Network Office was successfully renewed for the next five years by the National Science Foundation. The LNO will remain based at NCEAS, continuing to draw on their experience in synthesis science, open data, and collaboration. Focal areas for these five years include fostering new synthesis science, broadening participation in ecology, and training a new generation of ecologists; these foci were emphasized in the program’s 40-year review and affirmed in partnership with NSF.

*Teamwork at the Arctic LTER. Credit: Jason Dobkowski, CC By-SA 4.0.*

This past fall, we launched our Synthesis Skills for Early Career Researchers course. The course draws on the LTER Network Office’s decades of synthesis experience to connect graduate students and postdocs across sites to teach the skills needed to succeed in collaborative, cross-disciplinary, and multi-ecosystem projects.

The first cohort includes 27 students from 14 sites. The curriculum includes classroom instruction, intentional networking and mentorship, and practice In a small group synthesis project students use real data to address fundamental questions in ecology while practicing newly acquired synthesis skills. The course aims to build lasting connections among sites and career stages while fostering a culture of synthesis reproducibility, and open science and advancing the careers of some of our most promising young researchers. Both the SSECR curriculum and the ecological data synthesis primer, developed with EDI and information managers from LTER and other networks, are publicly available for reuse by others.

*Members of the first SSECR cohort work through a reproducible research exercise using lego bricks during their week in Santa Barbara. Credit: Gabriel De La Rosa, CC BY-SA 4.0.*

This year, we funded two new full synthesis groups, the Assessing the resilience of productivity to climate variability across management and climate gradients group and the Consumer Absence Generates Ecological Dissimilarity (CAGED) group, as well as supporting three of our 2022 groups during their final year of funding. Synthesis working groups remain the core of our synthesis support at the LNO as they continue to demonstrate success: LTER synthesis groups published 9 papers and 3 datasets this year alone. Notably, one paper and another dataset emerged from our Scientific Peers Advancing Research Collaborations (SPARC) working groups, a new one-meeting working group model that debuted in 2022. We’re excited for our new call for SPARC working groups this year, which is out now.

One of our most impactful efforts this year is the work we have put into making our network more inclusive and accessible. Molly Phillips, our Inclusion and Access coordinator joined our team one year ago and dramatically increased our capacity in this space, coordinating and amplifying the efforts of the broadening participation committee. We launched mentoring training and a mentoring community-of-practice. We also released our first network wide Climate and Culture survey this fall. The survey helps us understand how the LTER Network supports its own people, and our goal is to use the results to highlight advantages the network can leverage and weaknesses the network can address in the future. Keep an eye out for the full report from the survey in the new year.

Arctic Lead PI Kevin Griffin walks his students through data in a poplar stand at the Arctic LTER. Mentorship plays a huge role in preparing students for work at the LTER—and we’ve invested mentorship skills training that is available across the LTER. Credit: Gabriel De La Rosa, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The first cohort of our Authentic Research Experience for Teachers project returned to LTER field sites, deepening their understanding of ecological research and data. They also came to NCEAS and the Santa Barbara Coastal LTER where they learned more about open science and collaborated on lesson plans and classroom materials for building data literacy at the high school and middle school levels. The program builds on our robust but site specific education programs across the LTER by introducing teachers to our network as a whole, including our research and all of the great LTER data readily available for classroom use. We’re excited to welcome the program’s second cohort of 12 teachers this summer.

K-12 teachers from the ARETS program visit Santa Barbara for a week of collaboration and learning.

Finally, our Advancing Public Engagement Across LTER’s project is now in its third and final year. Three sites have developed new strategic engagement plans and the project published their SCRREE framework (Strategic, Cumulative, Reciprocal, Reflexive, Equitable, and Evidence-based) for conducting public engagement activities, drawing on examples from the LTER Network. With much of this work behind us, we’re excited to use what we have learned from the project and inspire our other sites to develop more strategic and reciprocal public engagement initiatives based on our results.

Our momentum building continues into 2025. In January, the LNO will convene seasoned researchers and early career folks from our network alongside representatives from key partners to discuss how the LTER Network should prioritize our work over the next decade. These long-term planning efforts began earlier this year and accelerated during our Science Council meeting this past summer; by involving more early career and outside LTER voices in the upcoming January planning meeting, we hope to clarify the LTER’s position in ecology and truly understand our strengths and weaknesses. It’s exciting to think about the network from a high-level perspective, and our goal is to use this planning to help the LTER Network be the most impactful version of itself.

It’s an exciting time to be part of our network. Momentum is all around us, from synthesis science to education initiatives and beyond. We hope to carry that momentum through 2025 and beyond.

The LTER Network Office
Marty Downs
Gabe De La Rosa
Molly Phillips
Nick Lyon
Cristina Mancilla