Coastal Futures Conservatory

This article develops an account of listening as a model for integrating inquiries into rapid environmental change from arts, sciences, and humanities. The account is structured around interpretation of the Coastal Futures Conservatory (CFC), an initiative for integrating arts and humanities into the Long-Term Ecological Research Project at the Virginia Coast Reserve. The CFC organizes collaborative inquiry and public engagement around several kinds of listening, from field recordings and designed listening stations as practices of attentiveness to scientific data by sonifying data sets, across disciplines by commissioning convergent lines of research from humanities and sciences, and across political boundaries by creating cross-coastal exchanges. Working from reflection on CFC practices, the author evaluates the potential and the limits of a pivot from ocular to aural metaphors of creating environmental knowledge as well as the potential and limits of listening as a model for integrating that knowledge. The author then questions integration as metaphor for multidisciplinary collaboration by testing its openness to listening beyond human worlds. The article closes by arguing for the role of contemplative practices in developing “transformative listening” as a way to connect environmental sciences with processes of moral and political formation.

Sharing Information: Many Hands Make Light Work

The Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has shaped almost every aspect of my scientific career. It has enabled me to pursue ecoinformatics, a new and growing field, while allowing me to build on my training as an environmental scientist within the context of an intelligent, vibrant, and dedicated team of researchers and collaborators. Skills that I learned initially as part of workshops sponsored by the LTER program—on Geographical Information Systems (GIS), ecological information management, and wireless sensor networks—are now the skills I teach to others in a variety of formal and informal educational settings, including graduate and undergraduate classes. As a leader in sharing scientific data, the LTER program provides a strong positive and dynamic example of how data can be shared to enable new scientific syntheses. I communicate widely within the LTER network and with the larger community regarding the ethics, techniques, and values of data sharing. Collaboration, with researchers and other information managers, is a critical aspect of successfully promoting the sharing of ecological data and the important new discoveries that arise from such sharing. I started my work with the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) project in the LTER program at its inception in 1987. I started work at VCR site immediately after completing graduate school, as a postdoctoral fellow (1988– 1991), then subsequently as a co–principal investigator and eventually as principal investigator. Although my primary contribution to the project has been as an information manager, I also engage in a variety of landscape, environmental sensing, and population-related research. Also, I briefly served as principal investigator (1997–1998), when the former and subsequent principal investigator (Bruce Hayden) did a rotation at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Within the LTER network, I have been very active in the Information Management (IM) committee and served on the LTER Executive Committee (1997–2002) and as a cochair of the Network Information System Advisory Committee. In addition, I served as a part-time program director in Biological Databases at NSF (1993–1994). Academically, I am a research associate professor at the University of Virginia, where in addition to my research, I teach courses on GIS.

Networking: From the Long-Term Ecological Research Program to the National Ecological Observatory Network

As a scientist, the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has been on my mind for more than three decades. As an educator, I have served in the classroom for 41 years. The merger of the physical and the ecological sciences was at the core of my teaching philosophy. As a science communicator, I informed the general public on issues of climate and climate change. As a collaborator, I found that understanding strengths and weaknesses in collaborative partnerships best ensures success. As a science leader, I served at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as the Director of the Division of Environmental Biology (DEB), established the Schoolyard LTER Program, and launched the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). My disciplinary background includes formal graduate education at the University of Wisconsin in meteorology, climatology, and paleoclimatology, as well as in oceanography and biology (mycology, botany, zoology, and genecology). As a postdoctoral fellow, my scientific identity was on track to culminate as a paleoclimatologist. As an assistant and associate professor, my identity morphed to include coastal geomorphology (Hayden et al. 1995). Finally, my experiences in the LTER program have vectored my career toward the interactions of climate and vegetation (Hayden 1998). My affiliation is with the Virginia Coast Reserve (VCR) site in the LTER program (1986–2014). As one of the founding principal investigators of the VCR site, I have served in subsequent renewals as its principal or co-principal investigator. Our site-based research plan focused on the Virginia Coast Reserve on Virginia’s eastern shore with a focus on the dynamics of the chain of 14 barrier islands, bounded by the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay to the south and Assateague Barrier Island to the north. This peninsula is 100 km in length by 20 km in width. Only the islands fronting the Mississippi delta are more dynamic in both the temporal and spatial domains. Prior to joining the LTER program, my research was hemispheric to regional in scope, and it focused on the environmental dynamics of the Atlantic Coast from Florida to Cape Cod at 50-m intervals (Fenster and Hayden 2007).

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.