A National Program of Research

With an initial set of six sites selected in 1980, the National Science Foundation established the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Program to support research on long-term ecological phenomena in the United States. The present program consists of 18 sites representing diverse ecosystems and research emphases and a coordination or network office.

The LTER Network is a collaborative effort among over 775 scientists and students which extends the opportunities and capabilities of the individual sites to promote synthesis and comparative research across sites and ecosystems and among other related domestic and international research programs.

The mission of the LTER Network is to conduct and nurture ecological research by:

Understanding general ecological phenomena which occur over longer temporal and spatial scales; Creating a legacy of well-designed and documented long-term experiments and observations for the use of future generations; Conducting major synthetic and theoretical efforts; and Providing information for the identification and solution of societal problems.

For more details on LTER and NSF use

National LTER Program

National Science Foundation