Compiled by Bob Waide and Sharon Kingsland, with contributions from many authors across the LTER Network, this volume explores the challenges of sustaining long-term ecological research through a historical analysis of the Long Term Ecological Research Program created by the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1980. The book examines reasons for the creation of the… Read more »
How do we make field experiences more approachable for students new to research and our study sites? To support participation by students underrepresented in science, we must work to balance out differences in prior experience and situational knowledge and to bridge cultural differences in perceptions of field work and field stations. One feasible approach is… Read more »
The LTER Network has launched a new community platform, dubbed the LTERHub, to allow LTER participants to seek out colleagues with common interests and share information, questions, updates , and resources. The LTERHub will also be the home base for LTER committees and discussion groups going forward. Most active LTER participants have received invitations and… Read more »
Wildfires have made headlines worldwide in recent years — and for good reason. Evidence points to increasing wildfire frequency and intensity across many vulnerable ecosystems as climate change impacts grow ever more evident. However, periodic wildfires in ecosystems adapted to them can actually help inhibit plant disease outbreaks, according to new research from Cedar Creek… Read more »
By John Porter, Virginia Coastal Reserve LTER The big decision and assessing virtual meeting needs Each January, the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER holds an “All Scientists’ Meeting” to exchange information about research progress and to plan for upcoming activities over the coming year. Typically, this is an in-person meeting held at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal… Read more »
This spotlight is part of an ongoing series featuring many of our LTER Network graduate student representatives who contribute valuable research and leadership across the network. To learn more about LTER graduate research, visit this page. Marina Lauck is a fourth year PhD candidate at Arizona State University and is the graduate student representative for… Read more »
Registration is now open for an upcoming NSF NEON Workshop titled ‘Complex Landscapes at Scale: Integrating our Understanding of Managed and Unmanaged Lands at Regional to Continental Scales.’ Growing societal pressure for agriculture that is both productive and environmentally responsive creates opportunities to design crop and rangeland systems that better integrate with their wildland counterparts…. Read more »
By Jon Ide and Mark Servilla, Environmental Data Initiative ezEML is a form-based online tool to streamline the creation of metadata in the Ecological Metadata Language (EML). It was created by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and employs EDI’s Metapype library, which is a general-purpose framework for creating and validating metadata, along with Metapype’s implementation… Read more »
Earth is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis that is expected to worsen into the future. Scientists are scrambling to study how species interactions are responding to climate and ecosystem change, but often lack long-term, large-scale datasets that help determine which processes are most relevant in a given ecosystem. In a new paper, members… Read more »
Two new synthesis working groups, awarded in 2021, capitalize on the intensive and extended record of observation at LTER sites to shed light on thorny ecological questions.
