LTER V: New Science, Synthesis, Scholarship, and Strategic Vision for Society

哈佛森林LTER项目是一项持续了20年的综合研究和教育项目，旨在调查新英格兰地区森林对人类和环境变化的反应。HFR有30多名研究人员、200多名研究生和本科生以及数十个机构参与研究，包括社会、生物和物理科学。科学家们在多个时间尺度上进行这项工作：调查现在，回顾几千年前，并利用这些知识来计算未来的变化。在接下来的六年里，研究将整合该站点在研究、教育和推广方面的站点到区域尺度的优势，以了解气候变化、生物过程和人类土地利用对生态系统动态、过程及其为人类和野生动物提供的服务的相互作用。研究人员将通过将新的和正在进行的实验的长期数据应用于综合情景分析来研究这个问题，这是科学家和决策者共同确定影响当前和未来景观变化的因素的框架。然后将这些因素纳入模式，以便将一系列可能的未来情景（例如石油资源有限的未来）与森林动态和生态系统过程的一系列潜在后果（例如增加砍伐森林以生产以前由石油产生的热量和能源）联系起来。为了扩大其研究项目的影响，哈佛森林项目致力于强大的教育和推广项目，吸引K-12，本科生和研究生，以及土地管理者，民选决策者和新闻媒体，生产和理解与社会相关的生态数据。这项研究是由哈佛森林领导的一项全国性努力的一部分，该努力将所有LTER站点的区域土地利用情景纳入其中。让决策者参与成果的产生以及这些成果的公众推广，填补了科学家和公众的关键知识空白，并帮助决策者更好地利用科学来解决与社会相关的问题。

The Harvard Forest LTER program is a two decade-strong, integrated research and educational program investigating forest responses to human and environmental change across the New England region. HFR engages more than 30 researchers, 200 graduate and undergraduate students, and dozens of institutions in research that incorporates social, biological, and physical sciences. Scientists conduct this work across multiple time scales: investigating the present, looking back thousands of years, and using that knowledge to calculate future change. Over the next six years, research will integrate the site's site-to-regional-scale strengths in research, education, and outreach to understand the interactive effects of climate change, biological processes, and human land-use on ecosystem dynamics, processes, and the services they provide to humans and wildlife. Researchers will pursue this question by applying long-term data from new and ongoing experiments to integrated scenarios analyses, which are a framework for scientists and decision-makers to work together to determine what factors influence present and future landscape change. These factors will then be incorporated into models to link a range of potential future scenarios, such as a future with limited oil resources, with a range of potential consequences for forest dynamics and ecosystem processes, such as an increase in forest cutting to produce heat and energy formerly produced by oil.To broaden the impacts of its research programs, the Harvard Forest project is committed to strong education and outreach programs that engage K-12, undergraduate, and graduate students, as well as land managers, elected decision-makers, and the news media, to produce and to understand societally-relevant ecological data. This research is part of a national-scale effort led by the Harvard Forest to incorporate regional land-use scenarios at all LTER sites. The inclusion of decision-makers in the production of the results, and public outreach of those results, fills critical knowledge gaps for scientists and the public, and helps decision-makers better use science to address societally-relevant questions.