Growing Up with the Konza Prairie Long-Term Ecological Research Program

As someone who began working at a Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site prior to beginning his PhD studies, there is little doubt that the LTER program has been a major influence on all aspects of my scientific career. Working within the LTER program has provided me with great appreciation for the power of collaboration, large-scale and long-term experiments, and cross-disciplinary interactions. Scientists within the LTER network are among the most successful and influential in the world, and thus associating with them has many positive professional and personal consequences. Among the most valuable professional benefits are opportunities for exposure to ideas well beyond what a scientist experiences in a more typical research environment and the opportunity to collaborate and publish with scientists who are leaders in fields other than his or her own. My experience with the LTER program began in January 1982 with my employment at the Konza Prairie site (KNZ) in northeastern Kansas. I had recently completed an MS (in botany with a focus on subalpine plant ecophysiology) at the University of Wyoming, and I knew nothing about the new (at the time) LTER program. But at the urging of a fellow graduate student, Don Young (who eventually took a position at Virginia Commonwealth University and has long been involved with the Virginia Coast Reserve site), I applied for a research assistant position advertised in Science. This position description specifically highlighted that skills and experience were needed in abiotic measurements (i.e., installing a weather station and precipitation gauge networks and taking charge of monitoring climatic variables); these were tasks with which I had familiarity as part of my graduate program. As a lifelong resident of the western third of the United States and a fan of the mountains (often openly speaking negatively about grasslands!), I was not keen to even consider a position in eastern Kansas. But Don Young was an effective advocate and stressed the importance of keeping an open mind, something I try to stress with my students today. After presenting my research at the meeting of the Ecological Society of America in 1981, Don and I and a few other graduate students stopped in Manhattan, Kansas, as we drove cross-country from Bloomingt on, Indiana, to Laramie, Wyoming.