Long-Term Ecological Research Program: A Report of the Thirty Year Review Committee

摘要

The National Science Foundation (NSF) convened a small group of experts to evaluate the strategic plan for the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program. The charge to this group was to provide a prospective assessment and strategic vision for the next decade of LTER. In response to that charge, the committee met twice (June 2010, October 2010) and committee members made site visits to 8 LTER sites and the LTER Network Office. In the review, we evaluated whether the LTER program's plans for moving forward are likely to stimulate a future that is even more successful than its past. In general, the committee finds that the LTER network has articulated a good strategy for the future that can be improved into a great strategy once several challenges have been addressed. To move forward, the network must clearly delineate its unique value in the complex universe of ecological and environmental science, and must articulate the questions that can only be uniquely addressed with studies on decadal time-scales. It must continue to build its network-level capacities at both the practical level, where data management poses a significant challenge, and at the vision level, where hard questions must be addressed. The network must poise the LTER program very explicitly to meet some grand scientific challenges, and then evolve to provide the critical science that helps address these challenges. The network must become an active participant in new, emerging programs that will also address long time-scales and continental spatial scales perhaps playing a key role in a network of networks that brings it together with NEON, OOI, Earthscope, ULTRA and other programs with parallel goals in related fields.