The EcoTrends Project began in 2004 as a joint collaboration among the LTER Program, USDA Agricultral Research Service, and the USDA Forest Service with two goals: (1) to create a book illustrating trends in long -term data and showing the value of long-term data across a network of sites in addressing continental-scale questions, and (2) to make long-term biotic and abiotic data easily accessible through a common web interface with a focus on derived or aggregated data to allow cross-site analyses to be made.

The US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program began in 1980 to address large scale ecological phenomena through research at individual sites and through comparative and synthetic activities among sites. We applied network science measures to assess how the LTER program has performed as a coherent system using joint publications among sites as the measure of collaborations across sites. We identified three periods of increasing collaboration.

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) entered in 2004 in a five year cooperative agreement with LTER. The NBII-LTER cooperative agreement is the result of efforts championed by W. Michener dating back to 2000. The overarching goal is the interoperability of both networks: Sharing the wealth on information on ecological and biological resources, and offer those to educators,, scientists, lawmakers and the public in general.

The LTER Network Information System (NIS) is the primary channel for exposing site-based data and metadata through a unified interface for use by value-added applications that include synthesis projects at both local and national scales, and is a core component of the Strategic Cyberinfrastructure Plan. The underlying framework to enable the LTER NIS is the Provenance Aware Synthesis Tracking Architecture (PASTA).

DataONE (Observation Network Earth) ensures the preservation and access to earth observation data spanning broad science disciplines to enable advances in science and education. For example, data on the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases can facilitate advances in climate change science and modeling, while data on land use patterns can facilitate scientific understanding of human-environment interactions at local and regional scales.

DataONE (Observation Network Earth) ensures the preservation and access to earth observation data spanning broad science disciplines to enable advances in science and education. For example, data on the sources and sinks of greenhouse gases can facilitate advances in climate change science and modeling, while data on land use patterns can facilitate scientific understanding of human-environment interactions at local and regional scales.

The LTER Network uses Remote Sensing and Geographic Information System technologies extensively in its research activities. The focus for remote sensing and GIS activities at LNO is for data acquisition and the cross-site, large-scale collaborations which are afforded by these data.

Images and Scenes from the 2006 LTER All Scientists Meeting

Details of LNO activities in service to the LTER community

Details of LNO activities in service to the LTER community