A STUDENT PERSPECTIVE ON LTER INTERSITE WORK

Participating on the Long-Term Intersite Decomposition Experiment Team
(LIDET) project has allowed me to gain valuable experience in a network-
wide intercomparison study as a graduate student. Most people are familiar
with the LIDET project as a bold cross-site field study. At 17 sites in
the LTER Network (and several other sites), decomposition rates of 10
types of plant litter (most foreign to the site) are being monitored in
the field. But there is also a modeling component. 

As part of my dissertation work, I (together with advisor John Aber) have
developed a model to predict field results across a range of sites. Not
only is the LIDET data collected in a coordinated fashion, but the
modeling project itself involves an intercomparison study in which three
other models run by LTER investigators (Daryl Moorhead, Jornada; Bill
Parton, Central Plains; Ed Rastetter, Arctic Tundra) are making equivalent
predictions. Mark Harmon, H.J. Andrews, is project coordinator. 

As a student, the experience of collaborating with established researchers
in the Network has been absolutely invaluable. I would recommend it to any
student based on this reason alone. People at different sites are apt to
use different techniques, cite different references, use different units,
and so on. Learning to speak the various languages has been as much a part
of this project as learning about the ecology of other sites. 

The greatest difficulty in the project has been in achieving a degree of
standardization among the models so that differences in predictions could
be traced to the appropriate causes. It was probably easier for me, as a
student, to mold my model to the needs of the project because the model
was still in development. Some intersite work might actually even be
easier for students than for investigators, who have much invested in
certain techniques or methods. 

Another facet of the intersite work worth mentioning is its pace. It is
much easier to work slowly on a project in which you only communicate with
collaborators every couple of months via e-mail, than it is to work slowly
on a project in which you pass your collaborators in the hall every day!
Intercomparison work proceeds, at each step, at the pace of the slowest
participant at that time. Since a project may run a long time from
inception to completion a student may not want to stake his or her
"graduating" schedule on an intersite collaboration. On the other hand,
students may also consider such work an investment in the future. As I
search now for a post-doctoral position, my involvement in the LIDET
project is paying dividends, because I know much more about other LTER
sites and I already have working relationships with some of the
scientists. 


Bill Currie, Harvard Forest

April 1995