Voices from the water: Experience, knowledge, and emotions in long-term ecological research (lter Italy)

Abstract

Based on the last decade of activities at the Italian Long-Term Ecological Research network (LTER-Italy), I describe and highlight here some major outcomes and challenges, by picturing different “voices”, which we are listening to and we are talking with. Organisms, ecosystems, methodologies, data, researchers, stakeholders and citizens: their voices – i.e., the information which we receive from them, and then interpret and, consequently, express – create our experience and knowledge, which we share with and convey to our contemporaries and future generations. One of the main narrator’s voices will be that of plankton: how we “listen” to them, describe and share long-term data and researches, also with the wide public. Through the “voices from the water” I will report and discuss experiences, which have been relevant also to open up the views on the role that science is challenged to play in a world of rapid change, characterized by complexity and contradictions. In particular I will consider: i) those voices coming from various LTER aquatic sites, mainly addressing the comparison among them; ii) how to make these voices most harmonized and audible through the open science approach; and iii) how to put the LTER voices in an effective dialogue with society. Finally, I will share some thoughts about the necessity and the possibility to open the purely scientific cognitive approach to other forms of knowledge, related to our intuition, feelings and empathy. If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. (…) If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. (…). “To be” is to inter-be. We cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing. (Tich Nath Han) ial use only.