The year 2020 is the 40th anniversary of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network and we were looking forward to grand celebration at the Ecological Society of America’s 2020 Meeting. While we cannot share our enthusiasm in person this year, meeting participants will find a cornucopia of pre-recorded talks, online posters and live-online discussions.
Two symposia anchor LTER’s contribution to the meeting. On Wednesday at 3 pm Eastern, the live discussion for LTER at 40: Insights and Opportunities will highlight four talks drawing on four key themes from the Network’s decadal self-study: resilience, connectivity, biodiversity-productivity, and evolution.
At noon on Thursday, another live discussion—for the symposium The Role of Networks in the Ecological Data Revolution—brings together LTER, NEON, GLEON, and LTAR networks to explore opportunities and challenges of cross-network science.
As befits the 2020 theme (Harnessing the Ecological Data Revolution) and the key role that LTER information managers have played in the ecological data revolution, many events focus on why and how to find, organize, and synthesize existing data. For a deep dive into data resources and methods, stop by the Data Help Desk, which is organized by a coalition of environmental data organizations and will be hosting live sessions at 12:30 pm EDT on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
For an inspiring take on what can be accomplished by synthesizing existing data, be sure to watch talks from two of the LTER Network’s recent synthesis groups and the related live Q&A, Reusing Ecological Data to Answer New Questions – Persistent Problems and Promising Progress, on Wednesday at 12:30 pm EDT.
While most talks and posters are pre-recorded and will be available to meeting registrants over the coming year, the live discussions assume that participants have watched the associated talks. For that reason, we have listed live sessions and the associated LTER talks first, in the order that the live sessions occur. Further down the page, you’ll find the list of prerecorded talks and posters authored by LTER investigators.
If your talk is missing, please submit the title and link though this form and we’ll add it…and next year, be sure to include LTER or Long Term Ecological Research in the title, abstract or bio.
Live sessions organized by LTER or EDI
Monday, August 3
1 pm EDT Live Q&A for Harnessing Experimental Forest and Range Data to Fuel Innovation and Support Resource Managers in the 21st Century
Related talks by LTER investigators (pre-recorded):
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- The USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges: Harnessing a century of data to address local, regional and national issues
- An analysis of long-term climate data across USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges: Historical trends and new tools for the future
- Hydrologic and water quality trends and responses to disturbances across USDA Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges
Tuesday, August 4
3 pm EDT. Live Q&A for Special Session 20, Working with LTER Data
Related LTER/EDI talks (pre-recorded):
Wednesday, August 5
12:30 pm EDT. Live Q&A for Inspire Session 18, Reusing Ecological Data to Answer New Questions – Persistent Problems and Promising Progress
Related LTER/EDI Inspire talks (pre-recorded):
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- Embracing the diversity of open data in ecology: Challenges, opportunities, and recommendations. (Metacommunities Synthesis Group)
- Heterogeneity in soil carbon stocks: Data-based or database-based? (Soil Organic Matter Synthesis Group)
1-2 pm EDT. Live Q&A for OOS 43, Biodiversity in Agroecosystems: Win, Lose, or Draw?
Because many LTAR investigators do not attend ESA as their primary meeting, this discussion is not part of the ESA meeting and is available to all (whether or not they are registered for the ESA meeting). Note that you do have to preregister for this discussion to get the link (there’s no fee).
Related talks by LTER investigators:
3:00-3:30 pm EDT. Live Q&A for Symposium 16, LTER at 40: Insights and Opportunities. LTER Network
Related LTER talks (prerecorded):
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- Experimental evolution in the wild: The power of LTER experiments for understanding evolution SEV
- Impacts of increasing wildfire severity on long-term carbon dynamics of Alaskan boreal forests BNZ
- Long-term studies reveal hidden roles of biodiversity and species identity in regulating ecosystem functioning CDR
- Propagation of influence among ecosystems connected in space and time. BNZ
Thursday, August 6
12:30 pm EDT. Live Q&A for Inspire Session 16, Innovations in Data Science Across Coordinated Research Networks.
Related LTER and EDI talks (prerecorded):
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- Find it, understand it, use it: How repositories help you navigate data challenges. EDI
- Provenance: Can I trust this result? HFR
- Creating inclusive educational opportunities in ecological forecasting. HFR
- Carbon uptake efficiency across Everglades wetland ecosystems. FCE
- Building networks of diverse ecological data scientists through team science. HFR
- Witness tree social media project: Can we increase science engagement with a twittering tree? HFR
12:30 pm EDT. Live Q&A, The Data Help Desk: Sharing Data
- Data citation: Why and how. EDI & DataONE
2-3 pm EDT. Live Discussion Panel, Coping with the COVID pandemic: How has it impacted research, and what opportunities has it created? FCE, LNO
3-3:30 pm EDT. Live Q&A for Symposium 1, The Role of Networks in the Ecological Data Revolution: Successes, Opportunities, and Challenges of Integrating Cross-Network Data to Advance Ecological Science NEON, EDI, LTER.
Related talks (prerecorded):
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- The Long-term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) network: Towards sustainable food, environmental integrity, and resilience in working lands (LTAR)
- The role of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) in the ecological data revolution. (GLEON)
- Improving ecological prediction: The role of cross-network data fusion in iterative ecological forecasting. (Ecological Forecasting Lab)
- Increasing research network connectance through synthesis – an LTER perspective. (LTER Network Office)
3:30-4:00 pm EDT. Live Q&A for Inspire Session 1, Art and Science: Novel Collaborations to Propel Environmental Change Research
Related LTER talks (prerecorded):
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- Variance Line: A material installation translating data at the SEV LTER. SEV
- The WaterViz: A confluence of art, music and science in a real-time data fusion. HBR
- Songs of change: A musical/artistic interlude. HFR
- Envisioning the future: The novel ecosystem generator. HFR
- Re-envisioning plant phenology, from data points to painting. JRN
Pre-recorded talks in contributed and organized oral sessions:
- Big data, local science: Not an oxymoron. JRN
- Body size-mediated responses to climate change in a desert bee assemblage. SEV
- Building networks of diverse ecological data scientists through team science. HFR
- Continental-scale effects of forest fragmentation. HFR
- Dendrophysiology: Linking climate memory and the age of non-structural carbon in southwest trees. SEV
- Differences in organic matter processing rates in marsh-mangrove wetlands are homogenized following major hurricane. FCE
- Do defoliated oaks die from carbon starvation? HFR
- Extreme precipitation interacts with N cycling in a semi-arid grassland. JRN
- Habitat-modulates effects of water level and salinity drive variation in photosynthetic assimilation of a scrub mangrove forest. FCE
- Landscape connectivity increases biodiversity and ecosystem services in working lands. KBS
- Linking perceptions of ecosystem services and disservices with landscape and biotic and features (CAP)
- Long term ecological research and evolving frameworks of disturbance ecology. FCE/LTER Network
- Nitrogen inputs and losses following disturbance: A slippery slope. CWT
- Nitrogen, water, and temperature effects on belowground biomass and carbon cycling. SEV
- Resiliency of the microbiome in grasslands: Can they recover after a long-term drought? KNZ
- Structural heterogeneity in above vs. belowground biomass pools differ for Spartina alterniflora monocultures, with consequences for forecasting ecosystem resiliency. GCE
- The importance of ecological memory: Insights from LTER-NEON data synergies. HFR
- Trophic structure of ponds engineered by American alligators in an oligotrophic wetland. FCE
- Urban wildlife communities in relation to ecology and people in a desert city (CAP)
- Wavelet models of synchronised growth in kelp forests. SBC
Also of interest: Emergent grand challenges from the 2019 NEON Science Summit. NEON
LTER and related online posters:
Greater than the sum of the parts: Collaboration in and beyond the U.S. LTER Network. LNO
Data-related:
- Soils Data Harmonization (SoDaH): A framework and tools for harmonizing and aggregating cross-study soil organic matter data. Soil Organic Matter Synthesis Group
- Annotating metadata to improve data discovery and reuse. EDI
- Data citation: Getting credit for the data you publish! EDI
- Harnessing the power of AI technologies for ecology: The Knowledge Learning Analysis System (KLAS) for spatially-distributed, continuous ecological data. JRN
- How to catalog your ecological data for open access science. BLE
- The Konza Prairie Spatial Data Portal: Modernizing spatial data access for ecological research. KNZ
- Streamline QA/QC for Observational Data. FCE
Education/Outreach:
Science:
- Aboveground carbon consequences of future land use scenarios in New England. HFR
- Biological soil crust function but not diversity is altered by predicted global change scenarios in New Mexican grasslands. SEV
- Chemical and organic farming methods alter ant activity during the Michigan growing season. KBS
- Detecting foliar nutrient status of northern hardwoods from the sky. HBR
- Does nitrogen pollution lead to adaptation among forest decomposer fungi? HFR
- Effects of rainfall manipulation on grass islands of fertility in the Chihuahuan Desert. JRN
- Experimental evidence for tree species, but not ectomycorrhizal effects on soil aggregate pools. CDR
- Increased precipitation variability alters the composition and function of the soil mycobiome. JRN
- Investigating the habitat use of coastal bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) in response to a major hurricane. FCE
- Precipitation legacies alter ecosystem sensitivity to extreme drought. KNZ
- Predicting imperfectly detected plant-pollinator interactions from latent features. AND
- Remote sensing of kangaroo rat mound demographics and mound impacts on landscape processes in the northern Chihuahuan desert. JRN
- Responses of biocrust and root-associated microbial communities to water and nitrogen additions in a semiarid grassland. SEV
- Systematic variations in the contribution of rainfall-driven soil respiration pulses to soil carbon cycling in North American deserts. JRN
- Tallgrass prairie plant responses to inoculation with native microbes: Implications for restoration success. KNZ
- Terricolous lichen community structure is driven by plant functional traits. NWT
- Understanding population trajectory through ups and downs: A case study of southwestern Michigan fireflies. KBS
