Long-Term Studies Sect Meeting, Ecological Socieity of Am., Portland, August 3, 2004

Attending: Bill Cook (ASU), Fred Hall (Plant Ecology), Jim Gosz (UNM), Scott Collins (UNM), James Brunt (UNM), Sean Anderson (Stanford), Jeff Corbin (UC Berkeley), Andy Dyer (U. So. Carolina), Henry Gholz (NSF), Laura Huenneke (NAU), Emery Boose (Harvard), Don Henshaw (USFS-PNWR), Gus Shaver (MBL), Bob Waide (UNM), Carl Bock (U. Colo.), Mark Stromberg (UC Berkeley), John Porter (U. Virginia).

Mark Stromberg presented a website that has been developed for the LTSS by John Porter (http://www.esa.org/longterm). This website includes many new tools that will allow the members of the section to communicate and share information.

Business

Election of officers. New officers were chosen by acclamation:

Chair Mark Stromberg

Vice-Chair Scott Collins

Secretary Bob Waide

Councilor Laura Huenneke

Councilor Brian Kloeppel

These officers agreed to serve for one year until a new election could be held at the 2005 meeting. Some discussion of the duties of the officers was suggested. Basically, the chair communicates during the year with ESA to plan the meeting and section activities. Attendance at the annual meeting of ESA by officers is encouraged, but not required. As the last two years have been relatively quiet, Chair duties have included the minimum decisions on scheduling a meeting, budgeting for refreshments, and attending the ESA Section Chair meetings. Any officer can become involved in organizing activities for the section. Councilors are encouraged to attend the ESA Council meeting at the annual ESA meeting. The chair has an e-mail list of those ESA members who have contributed part of their ESA dues as members of the LTSS. As of March, 2004, we have $2,469.10 in our account.

Two NSF program directors (Henry Gholz, Jim Morris) were supportive and had several suggestions for LTSS activities.

The members discussed several options for activities in 2004-2005. These included:

1. Developing ways to support long-term studies, often developed by small labs;

• Web-based forum/discussions for tracking long-term ecological studies that reside outside the traditional LTER network. John Porter can implement this immediately.

• Implement a long-term ecological data registry on the LTSS website that asks about 15 questions about each data set to facilitate discovery and contact with the data owner. Such data registries have been developed with NSF funding (SEEK, KNB) and other programs, many working with National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. Stromberg presented a data registry in use by UC’s Natural Reserve System and the Organization of Biological Field Stations.

  • This registry can be installed on the LTSS website in a few weeks by NCEAS (KNB) staff. A suggestion was made to offer up to $1,000 to a graduate student for travel to the annual ESA meeting, based on the number of data bases registered through the ESA website.

  • Coordination of such data registries was urged. Members resolved to look into the FLED project and determine if data sets described in that effort are included. Others suggested that we coordinate with the VEGBANK, a data registry for vegetation data sets.

  • Investigate the possibility of requesting PIs with LTREB funds to register. Later, Jim Morris (LTREB Program Officer, NSF) agreed to investigate this possibility.

• Support graduate student travel to the annual meeting of ESA.

  • See above. No other suggestions made. In the past, the officers solicited requests from ESA member graduate students and based on reviews of the applications; one or sometimes two small grants were made to support travel.

• Organize a LTSS-supported symposium for the ESA 2005 annual meeting. Each section of ESA is encouraged and supported to organize a 10-person symposium of invited speakers who make oral presentations at the ESA meeting. ESA needs each section to identify a theme, an organizer and a potential list of speakers by September 15, 2004. Jim Morris agreed to take this on, and is asking for help from the LTSS members in nominating speakers. Possible topics suggested include “Separating signal from noise in long-term data”, and “Value added, or insights, unique to long-term studies”.

2. Nominate committee officers for presentation at the 2005 Annual Meeting

• Names can be submitted in a forum to be set up on the LTSS website.