Population growth and urban sprawl are two issues that have long concerned environmentalists. Another, more modern phenomenon is that of urban to rural migration, wherein residents of urban or suburban areas buy property in areas more rural, less developed. This study is concerned with the land use decisions made by these new rural residents. The study is centered in Southwest Michigan, Barry Township within Barry County. The area is one of shifting land use patterns and increasing residential development.

The dominant theme of socio-ecological research in the Luquillo LTER Research Program is the influence of land use change on local climate change, secondary forest dynamics, watershed and stream processes, and ecosystem services. Much of our research is being developed in the context of the steep urban to wildlands gradient from the Rio Piedras watershed (RPW) in the center of San Juan metropolitan area(SJMA) to the Luquillo Experimental Forest (LEF) some 25 km away.

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.

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.

During the LTER-ZA meeting in Baltimore in October 2008, it appeared that US and French research teams involved in the study of urban and periurban aquatic systems were not measuring the same parameters in their field studies. Any cooperation between our research teams will be difficult as long as methods and monitoring approaches are different or at least their differences are well understood on both sides.

This session is intended both for social and biophysical scientists who want to help develop a proposal for the kind of “multi-site, highly collaborative and integrated research initiative” envisioned by the LTER planning group. The focus will be on what the LTER planning process calls the “centerpiece” of the group's conceptual framework, as well as one of “Grand Challenges” to be addressed at the network level – “the dynamics of coupled human-natural ecosystems.”

Land uses and management practices in residential parcels (e.g., aesthetic/recreational/economic uses, land-cover choices, irrigation and chemical applications) impact and are impacted by social (e.g., stratification and status, environmental perceptions, zoning) and ecological (e.g., carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, water demand and quality) processes.

The prospect for long term, interdisciplinary research continues to grow since the "regionalizing" of the Coweeta and North Temperate Lakes LTER sites and the initiation of the two urban LTER sites: Baltimore and Central-Arizona-Phoenix. Additional sites have recruited social scientists and expanded both the questions asked and the geographic extent of their interests. Thus, there is growing opportunities for collaboration among sites that might not identify themselves as "urban," in conjunction with the existing regional and urban sites. 

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.

This workshop has three goals:

1) Inform interested participants about a new way to organize the LTER site information.  We offer the public a view of the information that has no dead-ends, that is, all the content is related, and each website view offers related contextual content, including data, personnel, metadata, projects, and the like.

2) Receive feedback

3) Recruit adopters and developers