Announcing New LTER Synthesis Working Groups

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Synthesis Working Group Special Issue, January 2022

LTER Network News is a forum for sharing news and activities from across the LTER Network. If you know of personnel changes, new grants, or cross-Network activities that might interest your LTER colleagues, please send them along to Gabriel De La Rosa (delarosa@nceas.ucsb.edu).

Announcing Seven New Synthesis Groups

The Long-Term Ecological Research Network Office is excited to announce that seven working groups received funding from the 2022 RFP.

Three of the groups were full proposals and will receive funding for several in-person meetings over the next two years. The remaining four were Scientific Peers Advancing Research Collaborations (SPARC) proposals, and will meet once in the coming year.

Full working groups:

Interannual variability and long term change in pelagic community structure across a latitudinal gradient (Russell Hopcroft, Mark Ohman, Heidi Sosik, Oscar Schofield)
The Flux Gradient Project: Understanding the methane sink-source capacity of natural ecosystems (Sparkle Malone, Jackie Matthes)
Consumer-mediated nutrient dynamics of marine ecosystems under the wake of global change (Joseph Peters, Mackenzie White, Bradley Strickland, Jennifer Rehage)

SPARC groups:

Quantifying interactive effects of fire and precipitation regimes on catchment biogeochemistry of aridlands. (Tamara Harms)
Selection across scales—merging evolutionary biology and community ecology to understand trait shifts in response to environmental change. (Joseph Waterton, Jennifer Lau, Ken Whitney, Nancy Emery)
Do actively cycling C and N pools depend ultimately on soil P supply? Across-biome synthesis. (Ellery Vaughan, Craig See, Ruth Yanai)
Response of Primary Producers and Primary Consumers to Environmental Change – From small-scale disturbances to seasonal and long-term changes (Pierre Marrec, Grace Wilkinson)

For more information on the working groups, see the full story >>

Data Analysts at the LTER boost working group productivity

by Gabriel De La Rosa

The LTER Network Office hired two data analysts, Angel Chen and Nick Lyon, in 2022. They tackle short but critical wrangling tasks during working groups’ in-person meetings, grind away at long-running bits of analysis from afar, and teach critical collaborative and technical skills to facilitate easier collaboration within groups.

The result is that working groups spend less time bogged down in technical troubleshooting and more time thinking about, analyzing, and orchestrating novel science. Read more about the data analysts >>

coreR Workshop at NCEAS

UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Learning Hub is hosting our next coreR course in April 2023. This is a five-day introductory course on collaborative, open, reproducible, and essential data science skills taught in R. We encourage everyone and anyone, at any stage of their career to register.Details:

Hosted at NCEAS in downtown Santa Barbara, CA
April 3 to 7, 2023, from 9 am to 5 pm
Register online by March 3, 2023
Cost $2100 (includes course fee, lunch, and snacks)

We encourage students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, to apply for our Director’s Scholarship, which covers tuition, travel, and lodging for the April 2023 course. Apply online by February 13, 2023. Questions? Reach out to learning-hub@nceas.ucsb.edu or visit our website. Email us for more information about additional trainings offered throughout the year.

Corrections to the last Newsletter

In the "Around the Network" section of the Dec-Jan newsletter, the Northern Gulf of Alaska released their new virtual field trip that uses a fast-paced video, captivating video game, and beautiful art to immerse learners in the Gulf of Alaska ecosystem and explore the topics of food webs, environmental variability, and marine ecology. They were incorrectly identified as the Northeast US Shelf LTER.

In the "In the News" section, the In Photos: Fall at the Harvard Forest article by The Harvard Crimson was missing a link.

LTER Network Newsletters

From LTER: LTER Network News (monthly)/Science Update (quarterly) | DataBits (semi-annually)

Related Network Newsletters

Environmental Data Initiative (monthly) | National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) | International LTER (ILTER) Mailing list | DataONE

Photo Credits (top to bottom): Patrick Giblin via Flickr (CC-BY-SA 2.0),

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award # DEB-1545288, 10/1/2015-9/30/19 and DEB-1929393, 09/01/2019-08/31/2024. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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