The Long-term Ecological Research Network provides an ideal platform for documenting and understanding the impacts of global environmental change in a diverse portfolio of ecosystems. With that in mind, two of the primary goals of the LTER Network are to, “(1) create a legacy of well-designed and documented long-term observations, experiments, and archives of samples and specimens for future generations, and (2) promote training, teaching, and learning about long-term ecological research and the Earth's ecosystems, and to educate a new generation of scientists.” In some sense, these goals may seem contradictory. That is, how do you maintain a program of long-term ecological research and facilitate the training and development of the next generation of scientists who want to be trained and developed in less than a lifetime? In effect, these goals are highly compatible. In most cases, long-term observational and experimental data raise as many questions as they answer. Many such questions are tackled by graduate students through short-term data gathering campaigns, short-term experiments, and modeling projects that get at mechanistic understanding of long term patterns and trends. In other cases, graduate students have the opportunity to begin their careers by publishing the results from an existing long-term data set, often in collaboration with other LTER investigators. In this presentation, I will illustrate how graduate students have contributed to a better understanding of global environmental change through short-term observational studies, manipulative experiments, and collaborative syntheses of long-term data sets from the Sevilleta LTER Program as well as other LTER research sites.
Results/Conclusions
Graduate training within the context of long-term ecological research has many challenges but many more opportunities. There are multiple mechanisms through which graduate students can expand upon long-term studies by integrating their short-term observational research, modeling studies, and mechanistic experiments into long-term ecological research programs.
