TY - CHAP
T1 - How LTER Site Communities Can Address Major Environmental Challenges
AU - Swanson, Frederick J.
AU - Foster, David R.
AU - Driscoll, Charles T.
AU - Thompson, Jonathan R.
AU - Rustad, Lindsey E.
N1 - Funding Information:
Over its 40-year history, the US LTER program has also exerted a profound impact on formal and informal education and on public outreach, as documented in the histories of individual programs (e.g., site synthesis volumes in the Oxford Press series) and in several multi-site syntheses (e.g., Colman 2010; Driscoll et al. 2012). In particular, LTER has had notable success in delivering science information to decision-makers and a broad public audience, consistent with the requirement for “broader impacts” in the NSF evaluation criteria. The sustained long-term nature of the LTER site research communities allows for greater impacts than programs funded by a kaleidoscope of short-term grants (Hughes et al. 2017). LTER communities provide (i) conceptual frameworks for exploring the coupled nature-human system in an increasingly human-dominated world, (ii) improved environmental literacy of the engaged public, (iii) information about plausible futures for ecosystems and the environment through modeling and scenario analysis, (iv) well-managed, readily-accessible, long-term environmental data for future use in addressing issues challenging society, and (v) insights into landscape vulnerability and resilience to global change (Robertson eta l. 2012). These tasks require continuity and strong, lasting partnerships; the mission and sustained funding of the LTER program support those qualities at a site and network level.
Funding Information:
Wildlands and Woodlands, and its strong private and public partnerships and linkage of basic research to conservation applications, has become an increasingly important element of the broader impacts in the Harvard Forest LTER program over the past three funding cycles. LTER science has helped leverage significant funding from other NSF grants and programs (e.g., Research Coordination Network and Coupled Natural and Human Systems) and private foundations, thus providing the scientific input needed for extensive stakeholder engagement and outreach to policy and decision makers. Harvard Forest Director and LTER Principal Investigator David Foster has been the central catalyst and leader of both efforts, but the breadth of topics and lists of co-authors make clear that a large, diverse, collaborative group of colleagues—forest and landscape ecologists, policy specialists, environmental historians, biogeochemists—from many institutions has figured prominently throughout. In the formative steps of Wildlands and Woodlands, this Harvard Forest community identified a critical regional issue, laid the conceptual framework for addressing it, mapped a conservation strategy for the region, and began to pursue a solution, including working with state government and land trusts. A distinctive contribution of the LTER program has been co-designing future scenarios of land change with hundreds of diverse stakeholders from throughout New England, and then evaluating their consequences for people and nature using ecosystem models developed using LTER science. By using a participatory process for scenario creation, the scientists improve the relevance and maximize the uptake of the results (Thompson et al. 2012, 2014, 2016; McBride et al. 2017, 2019).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Long-term, place-based research programs in the National Science Foundation-supported Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network have had profound effects on public policies and practices in land use, conservation, and the environment. While less well known than their contributions to fundamental ecological science, LTER programs’ commitment to serving broad public interests has been key to helping achieve their mission to advance basic science that supports society’s need to address major environmental challenges. Several attributes of all LTER programs are critical to these accomplishments: highly credible science, strong site-level leadership, long-term environmental measurements of ecosystem attributes that are relevant to the public and to resource managers, and effective and accessible information that supports sound management practices. Less recognized attributes of three case study LTER sites (Andrews Forest, Harvard Forest, Hubbard Brook) which have contributed to major impacts include strong interdisciplinary research communities with cultures of openness, dispersed leadership within those communities, a commitment to carry science perspectives to society through multiple governance processes, strong public-private partnerships, and communications programs that facilitate the exchange of information and perspectives among science communities, policy-makers, land managers, and the public. Taken together, these attributes of sites drive on-the-ground outcomes. These case studies reveal a virtue of the long-term nature of LTER not anticipated when the program began: that the decades-long engagement of a place-based, science community can have a major impact on environmental policies and practices. These activities, and the cultivation of science communities that can accomplish them, go beyond the initial directives and review criteria for LTER site proposals and programs.
AB - Long-term, place-based research programs in the National Science Foundation-supported Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network have had profound effects on public policies and practices in land use, conservation, and the environment. While less well known than their contributions to fundamental ecological science, LTER programs’ commitment to serving broad public interests has been key to helping achieve their mission to advance basic science that supports society’s need to address major environmental challenges. Several attributes of all LTER programs are critical to these accomplishments: highly credible science, strong site-level leadership, long-term environmental measurements of ecosystem attributes that are relevant to the public and to resource managers, and effective and accessible information that supports sound management practices. Less recognized attributes of three case study LTER sites (Andrews Forest, Harvard Forest, Hubbard Brook) which have contributed to major impacts include strong interdisciplinary research communities with cultures of openness, dispersed leadership within those communities, a commitment to carry science perspectives to society through multiple governance processes, strong public-private partnerships, and communications programs that facilitate the exchange of information and perspectives among science communities, policy-makers, land managers, and the public. Taken together, these attributes of sites drive on-the-ground outcomes. These case studies reveal a virtue of the long-term nature of LTER not anticipated when the program began: that the decades-long engagement of a place-based, science community can have a major impact on environmental policies and practices. These activities, and the cultivation of science communities that can accomplish them, go beyond the initial directives and review criteria for LTER site proposals and programs.
KW - Acid rain
KW - Ecosystem experiments
KW - Environmental legislation
KW - Environmental policy
KW - Forest ecology
KW - Forest management
KW - Interdisciplinary research
KW - LTER program
KW - Long-term ecological research
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-66933-1_8
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-66933-1_8
M3 - Chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85104012602
T3 - Archimedes
SP - 223
EP - 241
BT - Archimedes
PB - Springer Nature
ER -