At the 48th Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Germany, Austria and Switzerland in Vienna (10-14 Sept 2018), Jörg Müller (University Würzburg and National Park Bavarian Forest) and Mark Frenzel (UFZ) will organise an LTER session. 

They invite talks and posters to this session particularly from the LTER community, that demonstrate the importance and application of long-term data sets. Details of the planned session are given below. The overall theme of this year's conference is 'Ecology - meeting the scientific challenges of a complex world'.

The need of long-term data for taking nature’s pulse

Gathering long term biodiversity data is mostly out of scope considering the usual run time of projects, but they are increasingly necessary to detect changes and developments of ecosystems in the long run. This issue is addressed by the international network ILTER (https://www.ilter.network), its European branch LTER-Europe (http://www.lter-europe.net/) and national networks like the German LTER-D (www.lter-d.de) which are dedicated to create, combine and analyze long-term ecosystem research data.

In this session we will especially focus on studies based on already established time series (at least five years) and those which recently started but are intended to run for a long time. However, due to generation cycles of organisms ‘long-term data’ is different in microbial ecology and large mammal ecology. Presenters are expected to demonstrate the relevance of their work considering (long-term) perspectives of communities and ecosystems. We look forward even to some hidden data sets available in private data bases and to 'lessons learned' e.g. in terms of ground breaking concepts for future monitoring.