My Evolution as a Long- Term Ecological Research Scientist

My college education as a fish and fishery ecologist provided a solid base for my evolution to a scientist absorbed by the long-term ecology of lakes in the landscape. Graduate students in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program and in my course lectures came to represent more disciplines and became more interdisciplinary, often addressing major ecological questions using long-term data. Viewing the dynamics of a time series and spatial maps became strong approaches in the LTER program for communicating with colleagues and the broader community. The LTER program would have failed without the realization and the broad application of collaboration. That is true, of course, for much of what we do. The LTER program is a great way to participate in and learn from a life of science teaching, research, application, and outreach. My association with the LTER program began in the late 1970s when I was a 41- year-old associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. It continued through the remainder of my professional life to the present; I am now an 80-year-old emeritus professor at the Center for Limnology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I had been the program director for Ecology in the Division of Environmental Biology at the National Science Foundation (NSF) for 1 year (1975–1976) and saw the first movements toward such a program. I participated in all three NSF workshops in the late 1970s to consider and plan an LTER program. At the workshops, I represented the perspectives of limnology and our field site at the Trout Lake Station in northern Wisconsin. Ideas being discussed and planned were of great interest to me. I believed that research opportunities at field stations with this long- term approach were important to the ecological sciences and to biological field stations across the country. My colleagues and I at the University of Wisconsin–Madison responded to NSF’s initial call for proposals; we were one of the first six sites to be funded for a proposal entitled “Long-Term Ecological Research on Lake Ecosystems.”