It often takes many years for environmental perturbations to have effects on ecological processes, and for ecosystems to recover from these perturbations. Global warming and its effects on ecological interactions, the theme of the 2010 ESA meeting, is a vivid example: Climate warming is a relatively slow process and its effects on ecosystems are often subtle and complex. Many ecological studies, however, run for only a few years and consequently focus on short-term responses, leaving long-term responses to perturbations unknown and underappreciated. Understanding of the full effects of climate change and other perturbations on ecological systems will require long-term data and careful analyses of such data. We propose an organized oral session featuring research conducted with the support of NSF’s Long-term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program. The LTREB program funds hypothesis-driven, long-term research conducted by individual investigators or small groups of investigators, which addresses ecological and evolutionary processes aimed at resolving important issues in environmental biology. Our session will feature contributions from ecologists conducting research at a variety of ecological scales from populations through ecosystems, and in a variety of ecosystem types including forests, grasslands, deserts and freshwater ecosystems. Presentations include those on planned large-scale, long-term experiments while others investigate the dynamics of natural (or human-perturbed) ecological systems. Each speaker will present original work that synthesizes innovative long-term research, but a common theme is that all of these studies explore ecological hypotheses that can be tested only with long-term data. Several speakers will explicitly address drivers associated with climate change, such as temperature, CO2, precipitation, and hydrology, and their effects on ecological processes. Speakers include a mix of well-established and younger ecologists. Each will present their most recent results, within the context of long-term data sets. This mixture of scientists at different career stages, studying different ecosystems and levels of the ecological hierarchy will create a dynamic session offering a variety of approaches, perspectives, and interpretations on the long-term response of nature to global change.