Genesis, goals and achievements of Long-Term Ecological Research at the global scale: A critical review of ILTER and future directions

Abstract

Since its founding in 1993 the International Long-term Ecological Research Network (ILTER) has gone through pronounced development phases. The current network comprises 44 active member LTER networks representing 700 LTER Sites and ~80 LTSER Platforms across all continents, active in the fields of ecosystem, critical zone and socio-ecological research. The critical challenges and most important achievements of the initial phase have now become state-of-the-art in networking for excellent science. At the same time increasing integration, accelerating technology, networking of resources and a strong pull for more socially relevant scientific information have been modifying the mission and goals of ILTER. This article provides a critical review of ILTER's mission, goals, development and impacts. Major characteristics, tools, services, partnerships and selected examples of relative strengths relevant for advancing ILTER are presented. We elaborate on the tradeoffs between the needs of the scientific community and stakeholder expectations. The embedding of ILTER in an increasingly collaborative landscape of global environmental observation and ecological research networks and infrastructures is also reflected by developments of pioneering regional and national LTER networks such as SAEON in South Africa, CERN/CEOBEX in China, TERN in Australia or eLTER RI in Europe. The primary role of ILTER is currently seen as a mechanism to investigate ecosystem structure, function, and services in response to a wide range of environmental forcings using long-term, place-based research. We suggest four main fields of activities and advancements for the next decade through development/delivery of a: (1) Global multi-disciplinary community of researchers and research institutes; (2) Strategic global framework and strong partnerships in ecosystem observation and research; (3) Global Research Infrastructure (GRI); and (4) a scientific knowledge factory for societally relevant information on sustainable use of natural resources.

Ideas and perspectives: Strengthening the biogeosciences in environmental research networks

“…Ecologists in many nations saw the opportunity and need for international collaboration among longterm ecological research sites to better quantify ecological change across spatial scales. Today in 40 nations, the independent ILTER Association includes about 800 place-based LTERs and an impressive array of facilities, scientific expertise, and enormous data legacies with time series that span over a century with increasingly standardized metadata (Mirtl et al, 2018). The LTERs are located from the Arctic to Antarctica and study forests, prairies, tundra, deserts, cities, agricultural fields, and a variety of estuarine, nearshore coastal, and coastal ocean sites.…”

Improved freshwater macroinvertebrate detection from eDNA through minimized non-target amplification

“…We compared the efficiency by comparing proportion of recovered macroinvertebrate reads from eDNA samples as well as number of OTUs for three different primer pairs. To this end, we collected eDNA at multiple stations of a German Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) (Mirtl et al 2018) site, the river Kinzig catchment. For this LTER site biodiversity data, especially benthic macroinvertebrate occurrences, have been compiled for over two decades allowing the validation of eDNA results.…”

The project EcoNAOS: vision and practice towards an open approach in the Northern Adriatic Sea ecological observatory

“…It will allow the release of data, metadata and instruments to the marine scientific community and to the environmental managers This activity is fully in line with the data management plan of the LTER networks, at the national, European and global level, since one of the LTER mandates is actually to foster open sharing of LTER data, in order to advance socio-ecological research and education (Mirtl 2010, Mirtl et al 2018. The ultimate impact of EcoNAOS on the LTER and on the wider community of marine ecologists will be related to a process of gradual change in the perspective of the opening research process.…”