Trade-offs of Participation in the Long-Term Ecological Research Program: Immediate and Long-Term Consequences

Abstract

For those who may have skipped to this chapter and not read the 3 introductory chapters, the 36 essays, or the 4 evaluative chapters of this book, the answer to the burning question “Does participation in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program change scientists?” is an unequivocal “Yes!” As Boyer and Brown (Chapter 41) point out, however, those changes are mostly in the realms of knowledge acquisition and behavior adoptions in the practice of science. Participation in the program did not appear to have a substantial effect on the development of attitudes. Could such changes have occurred outside of the LTER program? Schlesinger (Chapter 40) thinks so. He suggests that the LTER program provides “some structure and modest standardization to a set of common measurements” but that it has not substantially broadened or deepened the ecological sciences. Yet the effect of the LTER program on science, while a fascinating and often-addressed question, is not the focus of this book (see Willig and Walker, Chapter 1). Of course, to address how scientists change also involves understanding how they approach and conduct science. In addition, personal change occurs in a broad societal context. For example, the LTER program has coincided with and helped promote a transition in ecology from research done by one or a few investigators on a particular organism or process in a particular habitat to investigations involving multidisciplinary teams working together to test models about how ecosystem dynamics unfold across large spatial and temporal scales. However, going to “big programs” and “big data sets” does not mean losing a sense of place or being divorced from the natural history of particular organisms. Even as spatial and temporal scales increase, ecological research is ideally still “place aware” (Bestelmeyer, Chapter 19). Using the essays of this book as a rich source of information to address fundamental questions about the nature of scientists, we provide some final thoughts on how the LTER program has affected its participants, particularly on how they view time and space, collaboration, and communication. We end with reflections on the future of ecology and society, based on the views expressed in this book and on our own participation in the LTER program.