EVO-LTER: Leveraging long-term ecological research in grasslands: facilitating collaborations between ecologists and evolutionary biologists

It is important to understand how species will respond to Earth’s rapidly changing conditions. At Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, species and environmental conditions have been studied for decades. These sites thus provide a wonderful opportunity to study adaptation in response to environmental changes.

Unfortunately, it is hard to get such studies off the ground because so few evolutionary biologists work at LTER sites. The main goal of this project is to bring together evolutionary biologists and LTER ecologists to start new and exciting studies that unite the two disciplines. This will be done through a four-day workshop at the University of New Mexico’s Sevilleta Field Station.

Attendees will have plenty of time to form new professional relationships through many types of activities. Participation of early career faculty, postdocs and graduate students will be featured, as they represent the future of evolutionary ecology at LTER sites. The complex environmental problems faced by society call for building such bridges between scientific disciplines.

At the workshop, participants will develop novel ideas and methodological approaches to leverage existing LTER resources and infrastructure for evolutionary research. The first goal will be to identify ‘best practices’ for leveraging existing experiments, samples, and infrastructure at LTER sites for evolutionary research. The second goal will be to develop a framework to guide new eco-evolutionary research in a context relevant to LTER sites.

The third goal will be to identify promising avenues for future eco-evolutionary research at LTER sites and to convene a smaller group to envision future support for the research. The fourth goal will be to increase exposure of graduate students to evolutionary research at LTER sites by designing and teaching a distributed graduate seminar with workshop participants.

To best facilitate new collaborations, participants will include established ecologists at LTER sites and evolutionary biologists, many of whom have no prior LTER experience. Collectively, these efforts will provide a research framework for future scientific discovery.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.