Sustaining Long-Term Research: Collaboration, Multidisciplinarity and Synthesis in the Long-Term Ecological Research Program

Abstract

The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program was created by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to encourage comparative study of ecological phenomena that occur over decades and centuries. The vision, mission, and goals of the LTER network have evolved to address current societal needs: to understand the dynamics of key ecosystems, to interpret effects on ecosystem services of importance to humans, and to forecast the effects of future ecosystem scenarios. Challenges inherent in sustaining a long-term research program include building effective plans for research, governance, and transitions among generations of scientists. The LTER program has been extremely successful at meeting its original goals, but increased expectations for cross-site and network-level synthesis are not yet fully realized. The initial absence of a shared conceptual model inhibited progress toward large-scale synthesis. Recent agreement on a conceptual framework that includes multiple disciplines has begun to address this issue. On February 12, 1980, I began my first real job with the Center for Energy and Environment Research (CEER) at the University of Puerto Rico. I was hired to work on an ongoing program funded by the Department of Energy that had begun 17 years earlier under the direction of Howard Odum. Along with my colleagues, Laurence Tilly and Douglas Reagan of CEER, and Ariel Lugo of the US Forest Service, I was also to participate in a proposal that had just been submitted for a new NSF initiative called the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program. None of us knew very much about this program, and the request for proposals described it in five short paragraphs. Not only was it a new program, it was very different from other NSF programs. Proposals needed to involve groups of investigators working on core research topics, and the proposed work should be coordinated in some way with a network of other sites. Principal investigators were warned to be prepared to make long-term time commitments. Little did we know. Our first proposal was unsuccessful, as was the second. By 1986, I had become head of the Terrestrial Ecology Division at CEER. In that capacity, I represented the University of Puerto Rico as co–principal investigator, along with Ariel Lugo, on our third attempt at becoming an LTER site.