Retirement from the National Science Foundation at the end of June brought to a close nearly 20 demanding and rewarding years of helping provide support for the most promising research activities in environmental biology in this country. One of the most satisfying aspects has been my association with what we all now refer to as LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research Network). LTER had its genesis in responsibilities I assumed when I first arrived at NSF.
The general ecology program, of which I became rotating Program Director in September 1969, had been formed the previous year when the responsibilities formerly borne by the Environmental Biology Program were divided between two new programs, Ecosystem Analysis and General Ecology. In actuality, the new program was Ecosystem Analysis (now Ecosystem Studies) for its responsibility was principally the administration of the National Science Foundation’s funding of the U.S. International Biological Program (IBP). General Ecology managed the core of what had been the Environmental Biology Program. Dr. Charles Cooper arrived to become the first Program Director of Ecosystem Analysis.
Among the responsibilities of the General Ecology Program was the support of research at field stations. In earlier years, the Environmental Biology Program bad provided training grants to field stations to facilitate graduate research training in field biology. But training grants were being phased out at NSF and, in my first year there, attention was given to the consequences of this phase-out. An ill-defined concept of a “traditional” field station shaped my initial thinking about field stations and their role in ecological research. But growing acquaintance with the LBP biome projects funded in Ecosystem Analysis, and discussions with Charles Cooper and others led to a broadening of my perception of the array of potential sites for field research.
While I have no recollection of the timing and exact sequence of the development of the LTER concepts, [Chair] Jerry Franklin remembers that this subject was discussed at the first staff meeting he attended after he arrived at NSF in late summer of 1973 as Program Director in Ecosystem Analysis. Further developments profited greatly from Franklin’s viewpoint and experience with research natural areas. The Institute of Ecology (TIE) was funded to prepare a report on the current status of facilities for experimental field research, to include all potential sites from traditional field stations to the sites, for example, of the biome projects where Large-scale field experimentation could be undertaken. A large committee under the wise and able leadership of George Lauff prepared an excellent report, entitled “Experimental Ecological Reserves.”
During this period when the first focus had been on facilities for experimental research at protected sites, (here was growing appreciation both among NSF staff and some members of the ecological community that NSF needed to find a mechanism to provide funds for research into field phenomena on a longer time scale than the usual two- or three-year NSF grant. There was a ‘the prevailing short-term funding pattern was inducing ecologists to focus on what were essentially snapshots of long-term processes’ growing consensus that the prevailing short-term funding pattern was inducing ecologists to focus on what were essentially snapshots of continuing processes. Evidence was available even then that this short-term approach often provided a distorted view of long-term processes.
Reflection on the requirements for long-term ecological research projects immediately indicated the necessity of a suite of conditions, such as dedicated Sites, and data storage and information retrieval systems. Tom Callahan’s article in BioScience (June 1984, Vol. 34, No. 6) on the history of the LTER activity at NSF chronicles the presentation of these ideas for community evaluation at a succession of three workshops, and the announcement of the first LTER competition in 1979.
The future is beginning with an LTER Network that provides evidence of gathering strength. To date, preliminary reports from the site review teams of Cohort I have indicated strong site projects. That is no surprise. But what is most heartening to me is the evidence of the functional integration of the Network. Recent strides in implementing Geographical Information Systems (GIS) at all sites and the potential for the fuller exploitation of remotely sensed data, together with the growing ability to utilize established computer networks and the access to super-computers, promise breathtaking advances. The plans for the all-site experimental study of decomposition that emerged from the recent workshop are but one major step toward establishing the required experimental basis for comparative ecosystem science. The “Network” is becoming a network.
My hope for the future is that all environmental biologists will come to appreciate that “ecosystem science” is not just those aspects of life on a delimitable portion of the earth’s surface that are currently the purview of the Ecosystem Studies Program at NSF. To understand the interactions of the present inhabitants of any landscape unit, and their responses to any future global change, we must have concerned research on all aspects as studied by community and population ecologists, physiological ecologists, population geneticists, and systematists. Only then will ecosystem science be what it has to become if biologists are to shoulder their part of the burden of preserving this fragile and precious earth.