Ecosystems, both natural and agricultural, provide a host of benefits to people. Some of those benefits or “Ecosystem Services (ES)” can be sold through markets (e.g., food). Many others, like water-based recreation or aesthetic views, cannot be sold directly. Yet understanding their value is a key to designing policies that can enable these ecosystems to keep providing services. One indirect way to measure value of ecosystem services is via what people pay for the lands that provide them.

Quality control is a critical component of environmental data management, particularly for data collected by autonomous sensors. Performing quality analysis on high volume, real-time data from sensor networks, flux towers and instrumented platforms is a major challenge, though, and can become a limiting factor in managing these data. Software developed at the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER Site (GCE Data Toolbox for MATLAB) has proven very effective for quality control of both real-time and legacy data, as well as interactive analysis during post processing and synthesis.

The study examines farmers’ willingness to accept compensation to adapt environmental stewardship practices in Michigan based on the analysis of survey data and advances the literature on adoption of agro-environmental practices by developing a supply function for crop acreage managed for environmental stewardship. Results show that farmers’ acreage enrollment depends chiefly on farm size and the perception of environmental improvements from the practices.

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.