Long Term Research in Environmental Biology

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. Some key points to consider: • Proposals must address topics supported by one of the three clusters in the Division of Environmental Biology: Ecosystem Science, Population and Community Ecology, and Evolutionary Processes. • Ecological research on marine populations, communities, and ecosystems is not supported by LTREB and should be directed to the Biological Oceanography Program. • The Program intends to support decadal projects, with funding for an initial 5-year period requiring submission of a proposal that includes a 15-page project description containing two essential components: a decadal research plan and a description of core data.