The Niwot Ridge (NWT) LTER site was one of the five original LTER sites established in 1980. The LTER program is based at the University of Colorado-Boulder and is administered through the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and in cooperation with the Mountain Research Station, with special use permits from the US Forest Service.

Wireless networks provide new opportunities for retrieving data from the field - and to support new types of data. At the Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research Project we have employed wireless networks to connect to three barrier islands, with some connections spanning over 20 km. The wireless network is used to integrate a variety of data sources. A network of ten wells, meteorological and tide stations produce data that is automatically processed to create a dataset or graph on the World-Wide Web.

In recent years, advances in sensor network technology have shown great potential to revolutionize environmental data collection. Still, these systems have remained the purview of the engineers and computer scientists who design them, rather than useful tools for the field scientists who need them. Today, there are many data logging options for basic data collection in the field, but scientists are still required to travel to their sites to collect data, and to manually import data into spreadsheets.

This project is currently undertaking a comparative study of the formation and maintenance of Virtual Organizations (VOs) in two leading collaborative science networks: the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) and the Open Science Grid (OSG). Both LTER and OSG are mature enterprises for supporting multidisciplinary scientific research; however, they differ in the nature of their VO tool use.

Experiments or projects are central to all research endeavors, and LTER sites encompass many. Research projects are commonly documented at the site-level using various methods in order to maintain records for annual reporting, field site permissions, coordination of research activities in space and time, and for linking datasets and other products to individuals.

The Chicago Region ULTRA-Ex will address a question fundamental to understanding the dynamic interactions between biodiversity conservation, ecosystem processes, and human well being in urban landscapes: In a complex urban/metropolitan system, what are the synergies and tradeoffs between conserving biodiversity and providing ecosystem services to people? The project focuses on the Green Infrastructure Vision of the Chicago Wilderness alliance, a conservation consortium of over 240 organizations.

LTER-Europe is a network of national networks established in 2007 through a merger of existing smaller regional and new national LTER networks in Europe. It represents the European contribution to the global International Long Term Ecological Research (ILTER); 16 of the 44 ILTER members belong to LTER-Europe.

The vision for a future “cyber forest” at the Andrews Experimental Forest foresees high performance wireless communications enhancing connectivity among remote field research locations, station headquarters, and beyond to the university and Internet. Increasing use of sensor technologies and collaboration tools for both research and education foretell exponential increases in data and information flow.