In October 2007 the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) our decadal plan, in which we laid out goals for the Network in three major areas: research, education, and cyberinfrastructure (http://www.lternet.edu/decadalplan). The plan's goals are ambitious but realistic, forward-looking, and directed towards taking the Network to the next level of synthetic science. Three years of meetings, workshops, and collaborative writing went into the plan, and its delivery to NSF marked a milestone in providing the larger scientific community our vision of where LTER science is headed.
At the heart of the Plan is the potential for the Network to address important socio-ecological questions crucial for tackling the big ecological issues of today, via the Integrated Science for Society and the Environment (ISSE) framework. In various venues, including the LTER Mini-symposium forum at NSF in February as well as various advisory committees internal and external to the Foundation, we have presented examples of how the ISSE framework can be used to explore human-environment interactions in a wide variety of ecosystems across the Network. From polar to desert, inland to marine, grassland to forest, and urban to agricultural, the framework is proving to be as versatile and robust as originally envisioned.
The network-level multi-site research envisioned in the Decadal Plan will require major resources not now available to Network scientists. We are thus promoting the Plan as part of a larger, ISSE-related initiative that NSF might consider funding as a more general environmental initiative in an upcoming budget year. Such initiatives take years to formulate, and we are working on several fronts to move this forward.
At the LTER Science Council meeting in Baltimore in April, various groups began formulating plans for specific cross-site research proposals within the three topical areas identified in the Plan: land and water use change; climate change, variability, and extreme events; and nutrient mobilization and species introductions. The idea is that proposals for short-term projects might be targeted for existing programs at NSF and elsewhere in anticipation of later opportunities for the larger, long-term opportunities necessary to fully address decadal plan questions. Follow-on workshops, open to all sites, are planned for later this year, and the Network Office renewal proposal has a broad focus on advancing decadal plan goals.
Implementation of the cyberinfrastructure and education plans are also in the works. The Network Information System Advisory Committee (NISAC) is formulating an implementation plan for cyberinfrastructure (CI) that will be compatible with new efforts by NSF to address CI needs across all of the existing and emerging environmental observatories--including LTER, NEON, WATERS, and OOS. A multi-observatory whitepaper from a workshop held this spring should provide a path for implementing LTER goals that are in common with those of other networks.
Development of an implementation plan for education is at an earlier, pre-workshop stage. Roundtable discussions at NSF and Mini-symposium presentations have both provided visibility for the Network's education plans, and provided an opportunity to pursue workshop funding for development of a formal implementation plan. The Network's Education Committee will soon be engaged in this effort. In the meantime groups of individual investigators have submitted short-term proposals for work across multiple sites, similar in scope to proposals envisioned for research efforts, and these sorts of proactive efforts to advance decadal plan goals in the absence of a larger initiative are most welcome.
All in all, we are making expected progress at many levels. And we have reason to be optimistic that incremental progress now will accelerate in the foreseeable future--and thus we need to be well prepared to jump on when the time comes.