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Save Australia’s ecological research

Authors: David B Lindenmayer, Emma L Burns, Christopher, Dickman, Peter T Green, Ary A, Hoffmann, David A Keith, John W, Morgan, Jeremy Russell-, Smith, Glenda M, Wardle, Graeme G R, Gillespie, Saul, Cunningham, Charles Krebs, Gene Likens, Johan Pauw, Tiffany G Troxler, William H McDowell, Jane A Catford, Richard Hobbs, Andrew Bennett, Emily Nicholson, Euan Ritchie, Barbara Wilson, Aaron C Greenville, Thomas Newsome, Rick Shine, Alex Kutt, Ayesha Tulloch, Nicole Thurgate, Alaric Fisher, Kate Auty, Becky Smith, Richard Williams, Barry Fox, Graciela Metternicht, Xuemei Bai, Samuel Banks, Rebecca Colvin, Mason Crane, Liz Dovey, Ceridwen Fraser, Claire Foster, Robert Heinsohn, Geoffrey Kay, Katherina Ng, Chris MacGregor, Damian Michael, Luke, O’Loughlin, Thea, O’Loughlin, Luciana Porfirio, Libby Robin, David Salt, Chloe Sato, Ben Scheele, Janet Stein, John Stein, Brian Walker, Martin Westgate, George Wilson, Jeffrey Wood, Susanna Venn, Michael Vardon, Sarah Legge, Robert Costanza, Danny Kenny, Peter Burnett, Alan Welsh, Joslin Moore, Carla Sgrò, and Mark Westoby

Published in: Science, volume 357, issue 6351 (August 2017)

Australia will lose its integrated long-term ecological research (LTER) network at the end of 2017 (1). The network comprises more than 1100 long-term field plots within temperate forests, rainforests, alpine grass- lands, heathlands, deserts, and savannas, with an unparalleled temporal depth in biodiversity data. Its many achievements include Australia’s first published trend data for key ecosystems (2) and a suite of IUCN ecosystem risk assessments (3).

Long-term ecological data are critical for quantifying environmental and biodiversity change and identifying its causes. LTER is especially important in Australia because many of the country’s ecosystems are subject to frequent climatic extremes. Continuity of long-term research and monitoring, and broader use of existing time series data by science and policy communities, are crucial for measuring impacts of current unprecedented global environmental change and reliably predict- ing future impacts.

Long-term research and monitoring is also essential to understanding relation- ships between the economy, ecosystems, and risks to human well-being (4). The loss of Australia’s LTER network will substantially diminish resource managers’ ability to judge the effectiveness of management interventions on which billions of dollars are spent annually (such as vegetation restoration and invasive species control). Ending the network will also jeopardize sustainability assessments of resource-based industries such as agriculture and forestry. Moreover, Australia’s capacity to participate effectively in global initiatives such as the International LTER will be impaired. The LTER network is part of the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), funded by Australia’s government (5). TERN’s inclusion of existing LTER capability provided a template that others in Europe, China, and South Africa have followed. Discontinuing the LTER net- work within TERN will therefore undermine global cohesion in environmental research and monitoring.

At a time when the United States is increasing funding for its LTERs by US$5.6M annually (6), and other nations are rapidly building substantial LTER capacity, terminating Australia’s LTER network is totally out of step with interna- tional trends and national imperatives. To prevent the collapse of the LTER network and prevent the resulting irreversible impacts of breaking current time-series, urgent and direct investment by the Australian government is crucial.

  1. TERN, Quarterly Newsletter, Issue 16 (2017); http://www.ozflux.org.au/publications/newsletter/SuperSitesOzFluxCZONewsletter_Issue16_July2017.pdf.
  2. D. B. Lindenmayer, E. Burns, N. Thurgate, A. Lowe, Eds., Biodiversity and Environmental Change: Monitoring, Challenges and Direction (CSIRO Publishing, Melbourne, Australia, 2014).
  3. D. A. Keith, Austral. Ecol. 40, 337 (2015).
  4. D. B. Lindenmayer et al., Austral. Ecol. 40, 213 (2015).
  5. Long Term Ecological Research Network (www.ltern.org.au).
  6. Nature 543, 469 (2017).

Lindenmayer D, et al. (2017) Save Australia’s ecological research. Science PDF DOI