The use of social networking media, wikis, blogs, and YouTube has skyrocketed, and more and more people are using these tools to keep in touch with family, friends, and those with common interests. While many of these media target the social sphere, they also have uses in communicating science to younger audiences and in conducting citizen science. The purpose of this workshop is to provide a space for the LTER community to share how it has used web-based and social networking media, to identify best practices, and to explore new ways of using these media at LTER sites and as a network.

Large forest dynamics plots across the LTER and NEON network.

Jill Thompson, David Foster, David Orwig, Stuart Davis and Jerry Franklin

Information management plays a central role in supporting the broad temporal and spatial scale synthesis projects envisioned for the LTER. It is essential that all LTER scientists, students, and staff understand that LTER research and information management go hand-in-hand, and that the principles of information management practice be learned and applied by all LTER personnel.

Aquatic ecosystems regulate material transfer between terrestrial and coastal systems, and play a significant role in regional to global carbon (C) and nutrient cycles. The functioning of inland waters is being altered by human activities such as land use change, climate change, and hydraulic engineering.

Integration and synthesis of ecological information holds the key to important scientific discoveries at cross-site, regional and global scales. These opportunities will require that ecological researchers develop new approaches to the challenges posed by bringing together diverse data. This workshop has as its goal providing participants with new tools and approaches for discovering and integrating ecological data.

The objective of this brainstorming session is to provide a venue for microbial ecologists to meet others doing similar research at other LTER sites in order to foster cross-site comparisons and collaborations in the areas of microbial diversity and processes. Possible areas for cross-comparison include responses of microbe-mediated processes to climate change or nitrogen loading, and a potential consortium of sites testing the Moorhead & Sinsabaugh (2006) model of litter decay that is based on differential rates of degradation of litter components by different microbial groups.

The aim of this working group will be to discuss the upcoming Antarctic Field Season. By holding this meeting at the ASM we will take advantage of the fact that a large group of PAL and MCM investigators, staff, and students will be present and available to attend, although the meeting will be open to all.

The deployment of innovative sensor technologies and high performance wireless communication at ecological field research locations is generating large volumes of near real-time data streams that allow for unprecedented scientific questions and educational opportunities. Accompanying this sensor network development is a crucial need for tools to control, process, coordinate, validate, and analyze multiple data streams.

One of the overarching conclusions from the recent LINX II stream ¹⁵N tracer experiments was that direct denitrification tends to explain only a minority of nitrate (NO₃^-) loss from the water column (median, 16%: Mulholland et al. 2008, Nature 452: 202). The balance of “retained” NO₃^- (measured as ¹⁵N-NO₃^- lost from stream water) appears to have been assimilated rather than denitrified, and may eventually be released back to the stream.

New information managers (IMs) in the US LTER and the ILTER are often asked to perform tasks, such as developing a new site information management system, with little knowledge of the concepts from fields such as informatics, library sciences and computer science that provide a foundation for local information environments.