Taking the Long View: Growing Up in the Long-Term Ecological Research Program

Abstract

The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has shaped me as a scientist by providing a collaborative environment and the opportunity to take a long-term, large-scale perspective in my research. I share this perspective with students by incorporating the principles, questions, and data from such research into my teaching. Working at an LTER site, and one that is based in Puerto Rico, has allowed me to increase the diversity of my laboratory and our graduate program by facilitating the recruitment of women and minority students. Personal experiences with science and data management in the LTER program, particularly the bad experiences, have helped me to improve as a communicator in the broadest sense. Although being a scientist in the LTER program has contributed to my career in many positive ways, it has also presented challenges to my work–life balance. To maintain its leadership role, the LTER program needs to remain an open network welcoming new scientists, new ideas, and thus new potential for discovery. I grew up, professionally speaking, in the LTER program. In 1989 as a new PhD student, I was strongly encouraged (i.e., told in no uncertain terms!) to explore research opportunities in the Luquillo Experimental Forest in Puerto Rico. My mentors had developed a graduate field course in Puerto Rico that I participated in and later helped teach. Puerto Rico was their first venture into the tropics, one that was made easier by the fact that Puerto Rico is part of the United States and provides almost all of the conveniences of home. As one of my professors, Tom Siccama, liked to remark, Puerto Rico was “just like Connecticut, only different!” Puerto Rico was not, however, my first venture into the tropics. I had traveled, studied, and worked in Central and South America and the Pacific since my sophomore year of college and considered myself to be a tropical veteran. I felt at home in tropical rain forests, and had envisioned my PhD research taking place at some remote field site, in a foreign country, far from civilization: just me, my tent, the jungle, and the animals.