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.

Resilience has matured substantially as a system concept since Holling first applied the concept to ecological systems (Holling 1973). The literature has developed exponentially in the last quarter-century (Jansson et al.). It has been extended to apply to social systems (Westley et al. 2002) and to social-ecological systems. Finally it has been increasingly integrated into other literatures such as vulnerability analysis and sustainability science (e.g., Turner et al. 2003, Clark et al. 2003) and included in policy documents that address societal responses to climate change.

Annual Aboveground Net Primary Production (ANPP) datasets represent a core area of research in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network and many other programs. The Grasslands Data Integration (GDI) database is innovative in that it contains ANPP data from seven sites that are integrated at the level of the species and sampling unit, which facilitates fine temporal and spatial scale analysis of patterns of ANPP and species diversity.

Many urban areas are expanding and nearly 80% of the US population now lives in cities. With the inception of LTER sites dedicated to addressing urban systems (BES, CAP 1997), advances have been made regarding socio-ecological research and understanding urban ecosystems. In addition, many other LTER sites also conduct research on human dominated systems, thus offering several opportunities for cross-site collaborations.

Invertebrates have known impacts on ecosystem services, and these impacts are likely to change as invertebrates respond to climate change. In this workshop, we aim to use the breadth of knowledge and diversity of sites in the LTER network to conceptualize the impacts that invertebrates have on ecosystem services, and how these may be altered by climate change. Invertebrates impact ecosystem services both directly (e.g. pollination, pest and disease control, water pollution, decomposition, and recreation) and indirectly through their consumption of primary producers (e.g.

The Schoolyard LTER program supports a wide range of education outreach activities to K12 schools. One way that many sites have adopted is supporting students from local schools in the collection of long-term data near their schools. A recurring problem for sites that support school-level, long-term data collection is the storage and maintenance of the student level data. In many ways, the difficulties that the Schoolyard program has mirror the information management issues that the LTER program has faced throughout its history.

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 adoption of the Ecological Metadata Language specification (EML) has been key to building network synthesis architectures which are based on high-quality standardized metadata. Several scientific groups such as the Genomics Standards Consortium, the LTER GIS community and the NEON network plan to work further with EML either to directly describe data or to augment specific data collections. Additionally, semantic approaches for data description are emerging, and EML should achieve compatibility with these.

Implementing the ILTER Science Agenda: Defining International and Regional Science Initiatives Since its 2003 annual meeting, the International Long Term Ecological Research network (ILTER) transformed itself from essentially an infrastructure-building project to a more diversified, stable organization with the ability to implement substantive scientific projects in collaboration with the US-LTER International Committee (see web link in working group materials).

ILTER Synthesis Workshop: Interactions among ecosystem services, ecosystem dynamics, and human outcomes and behavior