The MIRADA project was launched in the fall of 2007 to establish a Microbial Biodiversity Survey and Inventory across all 13 of the major aquatic (marine and freshwater) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in the NSF US LTER Program. The long-term objective of our study is to document and describe baseline diversity and relative abundance data for both common and rare members of microbial communities and to relate this diversity to the underlying physical and chemical environment.

Lake ice seasonality (freeze day, breakup day, and ice duration) is closely related to climate change and variability. Trends and changes in variability and extreme events are apparent. The shared variance between mean anomalies of ice duration and Northern Hemisphere land air temperature over the last 150 years is r2 = 0.47. Mean trends are in the direction of warming. Ice duration has the steepest decline with mean trends (days/decade) of 1.7 over the last 150 years, 1.1 over the last 100 years, and 6 over the last 30 years.

What mathematical skills, particularly in the area of reasoning about proportions, rate of change, and rate of growth are needed for a high school graduate to effectively use knowledge and tools from environmental science as an informed citizen in a democratic society? What are the quantitative reasoning stepping stones from elementary school through high school that might help develop this key to environmental science literacy?

What skills and dispositions are needed by the high school graduate so that she or he can use knowledge and tools from environmental science to be effective decision makers and citizens? What are the pathways from elementary school through high school that might help develop this key facet of environmental science literacy? These questions are being addressed in the full richness of cultural relevance across our diverse nation in an NSF-supported project taking place at 4 LTER sites (SGS, KBS, SBC, BES) and a number of other sites in the US.

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.

With recent shifts in public attitudes across the United States concerning the problem of global climate change, momentum is building for aggressive action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the ongoing economic recession presents challenges for financing an aggressive climate change abatement campaign; hence, it is imperative that cost-effective strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions be identified and pursued. To accomplish this, policy instruments will need to be tailored to a complex range of local and regional conditions.

Units of measurement are a fundamental element of scientific discourse and data integration. The LTER Unit Working Group has developed two initiatives to promote consistent use of units throughout the network. One is the LTER Unit Dictionary, comprising the set of units in use by the LTER sites and the best practices that support them. The other is the Unit Registry, a software solution for online access to the Unit Dictionary. This poster provides an overview of both efforts, including motivations, progress made, and future plans.

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.