Letter from the Editor
Anyone familiar with the national Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network must have noticed the fast pace of current activity within the network, and this issue of The Network News certainly reflects that pace. Probably the most important of all these activities is the ongoing planning grant process, which has reached a crucial stage with the formation of various working groups and the development of crucial research questions to help meet the identified ecological Grand Challenges. This issue of the newsletter includes an update on the planning process; a fare of site, education, and informatics news; an interesting scientific report; and tid-bits from various LTER projects.
This issue also continues our new trend of carrying in print only short, simplified versions of stories, and publishing the full versions online to cater for readers who need more details. The online version is updated as often as we receive new stories.
As always, we urge you to keep your contributions coming-it's never too early to submit an item. Further, whenever you're thinking of contributing a story, please think about photos and illustrations to accompany it. Thanks to Hollywood, television, and a world gone multimedia-crazy with computer games, most of us now find "gray" text boring and need lots of visual stimulation to keep reading.
To all those who contributed to this issue we say thank you and keep it up.