The goal of the Arctic LTER is to predict the future ecological characteristics of Arctic Alaska based upon our knowledge of the controls of ecosystem structure and function as exerted by physical setting and geologic factors, climatic factors, biotic factors, and the changes in fluxes of water and materials from land to water.

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.

Humans make decisions daily that impact biodiversity, and it is essential that citizens understand the implications of these decisions. Yet, ecological systems are extremely complex, with many details still being discovered. Our challenge is to identify the underlying principles and concepts governing the distribution of organisms, and then communicate these details to students in a way that influences their citizenship decisions as participants in local and global communities. 

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.

The Baltimore Partnership for Environmental Science Literacy is a five year research project aimed at improving Baltimore area teacher and student knowledge in the environmental sciences. The Baltimore Partnership is part of the multi-site Culturally Relevant Ecology, Learning Progressions and Environmental Literacy, Math Science Partnership (MSP) project funded by the National Science Foundation. The project focuses on the critical education juncture of students in grades 6-12.

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.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be an NSF-sponsored research facility for the study of long-term, large-scale ecological change. NEON’s science mission is to enable understanding and forecasting of the impacts of climate change, land use change and invasive species on continental-scale ecology by providing infrastructure and information to support research in these areas.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a national-scale research platform for assessing the impacts of climate change, land-use change, and invasive species on ecosystem structure and function.