This is an Ad-hoc meeting arranged at the All Scientist Meeting.

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.”

The LTER Decadal Plan outlined a number of important and visionary Education goals and activities towards building  the intellectual capacity for integrative research which emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and synthesis.

Dominant plant species with high abundance and biomass are major contributors to nutrient and energy pools in many ecosystems. Therefore, the loss of dominant plant species can result in a reduction of ecosystem function, particularly if the remaining species in the community do not have similar functional roles. Many efforts have been made to document the effect of dominant species loss. These include observational data from communities where the dominant species has declined, comparative studies of mono- vs.

We propose that an LTER-wide taxonomic database would minimize much of the work of resolving taxonomic differences for future cross-site, network level research projects. The EcoTrends project has built a database to standardize site codes and nomenclature with USDA PLANTS database symbols* and/or the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) taxonomic serial numbers across all participating sites (totaling >1800 plant and animal species at 14 sites). We would like your help to improve, expand, and share it.
 

 The decadal plan for the LTER emphasized the need to develop an environmental science literacy framework around learning progressions within core science and mathematics concepts complemented with citizenship.  In response to this charge we developed a cross-site collaboration funded by the NSF Mathematics and Science Partnership program to (a) engage teachers around four LTER sites (BES, KBS, SBC, and SGS) in long-term professional development; (b) develop frameworks and assessments for learning progressions leading to environmental science literacy for carbon cycli

Over the past few years, several LTER-wide projects have created web services to easily find, access and compare long-term ecological datasets (e.g., EcoTrends*) and spatial datasets (e.g., LTER Spatial Data Workbench/CREATE**) across the LTER network; however, temporal and spatial datasets are often stored separately and accessed from different websites. Integrating long-term data and map layers from across the LTER network in a single website could be the next step in improving access to LTER’s rich legacy of both temporal and spatial data.

The major contribution of land-based activities to climate change and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is widely recognized by the scientific community. The question of how and whether to include the agriculture and forestry sectors in GHG emission reduction projects suitable for carbon emissions trading in ‘cap–and–trade’ programs however, remains controversial.

We propose using this workshop as a follow up session to the Identifying the benefits and barriers to graduate student cross-site socio-ecological research in urban systems GSS workshop. We will focus on developing features for a networking tool that links graduate students doing socio-ecological research in urban systems across the LTER network. During this meeting, we will brainstorm (and possibly test or create) effective networking tool(s) to facilitate students’ cross LTER collaborations and research.

Both slow and fast variables interact to produce ecosystem change observable in a human lifetime. Unfortunately, ecosystem processes that operate over hundreds to millions of years are difficult to document, but are likely essential for understanding future ecosystem changes. Ecologists have traditionally studied these long-term ecosystem variations using the chronosequence approach, which adopts a “space-for-time” substitution.