The quest for holy grails in long-term ecprograms: Potential dangers and solutions

Abstract

Long-term Ecological Research programs, LTERs, are necessary to understand processes that occur in time-scales longer than the period of theses, dissertations, and grants from most funding agencies. A basic result of a long-term study is the production long-term time series, but the establishment of general patterns and processes require data integration between many long-term studies and networks. These two main targets became like Holy Grails in LTERs, objectives on their own, many times dissociated from the questions they should provide answers. I discuss the advantages and potential pitfalls of these targets becoming Holy Grails in LTER, and Long-Term Socio-Ecological Research as a potential new Holy Grail.