Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB)

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, 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. Proposals for the second five years of support (renewal proposals) are limited to a ten-page project description. All proposals must be motivated by at least six years of recently-collected data on the study system and must be grounded in appropriate concepts or theory.