The Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) Program supports the generation of extended time series of data to address important questions in evolutionary biology, ecology, and ecosystem science. Research areas include, but are not limited to, the effects of natural selection or other evolutionary processes on populations, communities, or ecosystems; the effects of interspecific interactions that vary over time and space; population or community dynamics for organisms that have extended life spans and long turnover times; feedbacks between ecological and evolutionary processes; pools of materials such as nutrients in soils that turn over at intermediate to longer time scales; and external forcing functions such as climatic cycles that operate over long return intervals.
The Program intends to support decadal projects. Funding for an initial, 5-year period requires submission of a preliminary proposal and, if invited, submission of a full proposal that includes a 15 -page project description. Proposals for the second five years of support (renewal proposals) are limited to an eight-page project description and do not require a preliminary proposal.
Successful LTREB proposals address three essential components:
- A Decadal Research Plan that clearly articulates important questions that cannot be addressed with data that have already been collected, but could be answered if ten additional years of data were collected. This plan is not a research timeline or management plan. It is a concise justification for ten additional years of support in order to advance understanding of key concepts, questions, or theories in environmental biology.
- Core Data: LTREB proposals require that the author has studied a particular phenomenon or process for at least six years up to the present or for long enough to generate a contemporary time series that contains six data points. These data constitute Core Data on which the new project should be based, and analysis of these data should generate new questions, on the same phenomenon or process that provide the focus of the LTREB project. Requirements for core data are described in more detail in the solicitation. Please read these carefully.
- A Plan for Data Management and Dissemination that details information management and plans for data sharing with the broader research community and the interested public. Data from long-term research projects have value beyond the peer -reviewed and other publications generated by the investigators collecting the data.