Long-term ecological research and the COVID-19 anthropause: A window to understanding social-ecological disturbance

The period of disrupted human activity caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, coined the "anthropause," altered the nature of interactions between humans and ecosystems. It is uncertain how the anthropause has changed ecosystem states, functions, and feedback to human systems through shifts in ecosystem services. Here, we used an existing disturbance framework to propose new investigation pathways for coordinated studies of distributed, long-term social-ecological research to capture effects of the anthropause. Although it is still too early to comprehensively evaluate effects due to pandemic-related delays in data availability and ecological response lags, we detail three case studies that show how long-term data can be used to document and interpret changes in air and water quality and wildlife populations and behavior coinciding with the anthropause. These early findings may guide interpretations of effects of the anthropause as it interacts with other ongoing environmental changes in the future, particularly highlighting the importance of long-term data in separating disturbance impacts from natural variation and long-term trends. Effects of this global disturbance have local to global effects on ecosystems with feedback to social systems that may be detectable at spatial scales captured by nationally to globally distributed research networks.

Collaboration across Time and Space in the LTER Network

The scale of ecological research is getting larger and larger. At such scales, collaboration is indispensable, but there is little consensus on what factors enable collaboration. In the present article, we investigated the temporal and spatial pattern of institutional collaboration within the US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network on the basis of the bibliographic database. Social network analysis and the Monte Carlo method were applied to identify the characteristics of papers published by LTER researchers within a baseline of papers from 158 leading ecological journals. Long-term and long-distance collaboration were more frequent in the LTER Network, and we investigate and discuss the underlying mechanisms. We suggest that the maturing infrastructure and environment for collaboration within the LTER Network could encourage scientists to make large-scale hypotheses and to ask big questions in ecology.