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

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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.