**This story has been updated to include the missing summary for Topic 6**
The 2012 Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Mini-symposium will take place Thursday, March 1, 2012, 8:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at the National Science Foundation (NSF). This will be the 11th such symposium organized by the LTER Network to share some of the results and future plans of the LTER Network with federal, state, and non-governmental agencies.
The LTER Network Office has arranged to have the symposium webcast live at http://mtsms.unm.edu/Mediasite/Catalog/Full/cf020feb9c6a4222a57d8daa334f7e3521/5f78754cd5634385aae19a39929d6db914/cf020feb9c6a4222a57d8daa334f7e3521. The webcast requires that Microsoft’s Silverlight player be installed in the viewer’s computer.
The annual mini-symposium usually focuses on a single theme drawn from current or emerging ecological issues of interest to the public or to the ecological science community and based on research at the various LTER sites. This year’s theme is “How Long-Term Ecological Research Informs Sustainability Science and Action."
Presentations will include:
1. “Agricultural sustainability and nitrous oxide markets” by Phil Robertson (Michigan State University, Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) LTER):
Nitrogen use has a large bearing on the sustainability of agricultural systems: supplemental nitrogen is crucial for achieving high crop yields to feed a growing global population, but at the same time most fertilizer nitrogen escapes to the environment with unintended impacts on biodiversity, water quality, and climate. Research at KBS has shown that one pathway for this loss, emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, are related to nitrogen fertilization rates in such a way that relatively small decreases in fertilizer use can lead to large reductions in emitted nitrous oxide – providing a mechanism for farmers to be compensated by greenhouse gas markets for more efficient nitrogen fertilizer use.
2. “Managing for resilience in benthic marine environments” by Russ Schmitt (University of California at Santa Barbara, Moorea Coral Reef LTER):
A variety of natural and human-induced disturbances affect the persistence of marine foundation species such as giant kelp and reef-building corals. The challenge has been to develop effective management strategies that reduce their loss and enhance their recovery. This talk emphasizes the value of long term research in developing strategies to heighten resilience and in evaluating their efficacy.
3. “Innovations and lessons learned in distributed graduate education on sustainability science” by Jeannine Cavender-Bares (University of Minnesota, Cedar Creek LTER):
Over the past two fall semesters, an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional team including faculty from the University of Minnesota, Arizona State University, Harvard University, Columbia University, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Florida International University and Princeton University has developed and tested a hybrid classroom/Internet approach for teaching a distributed graduate seminar on sustainability science simultaneously to students at multiple institutions. This distributed approach has made it possible to bring together diverse expertise and perspectives of faculty and students from across the continent into a single real-time classroom, and has helped provide a pedagogic foundation for the emerging discipline.
4. “Local knowledge for the study of sustainability and resilience in indigenous villages of northern Alaska” by Gary Kofinas (University of Alaska, Bonanza Creek LTER):
The study of social-ecological system dynamics in Interior and North Slope is particularly challenging. This challenge stems from the rapid rates of change now observed in biophysical and social dimensions of the North, the paucity of available data, and significant cultural differences in indigenous and western lifeways and worldviews. This presentation explores how local and traditional knowledge can help to address these challenges and, in turn, build the resilience and sustainability of these systems.
5. “Urban water sustainability” by Claire Welty (University of Maryland - Baltimore County, Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER):
Our goal is to evaluate the interactions between urban development patterns and the hydrologic cycle and its associated nutrient cycles, within the context of regional and local climate variability. I will discuss elements of the modeling system we are building to evaluate the feedback relationships that control urban water sustainability.
6. “Building knowledge-action systems for urban sustainability: interdisciplinarity and reflexivity in San Juan ULTRA-Ex” by Tischa Muñoz-Erickson (Arizona State University, Luquillo LTER):
Problems of sustainability, such as resource depletion, energy sustainability, and climate change, pose a difficult challenge to producing useful science because multiple, often conflicting stakeholders, need to negotiate among trade-offs. In such complex decision-making contexts, we need to rethink the assumption that science can translate solutions into action in a straightforward way through the development of organizational ‘bridges’ or ‘interfaces’. Instead, efforts to effectively link science and action for sustainability need to address this complexity through institutional designs, some of which are discussed using examples from the development of a NSF’s San Juan ULTRA-Ex (Urban Long-Term Research Area) to illustrate successful and unsuccessful strategies to create a knowledge-action system for urban sustainability.
7. “Using the landscape to mitigate vulnerability and enhance resilience” by Billie Turner II (Arizona State University; Central Arizona-Phoenix LTER):
The design of the landscape—or land architecture—has been an undervalued approach for sustainability science and practice. This architecture affects tradeoffs among ecosystem function and services and human benefits; thus land configuration can be used as mitigation and adaptation strategies. To consider these strategies requires advances in spatially explicit understanding of landscape design, including scalar dynamics.
An archive of previous symposium topics is available at NSF Mini-symposia.
For more information see NSF Forum: The Challenge of a Sustainable Future: Long-Term Ecological Research Offers New Answers.