A Long-Term Agro-Ecosystem Research (LTAR) Network for Agriculture

As the 21st century unfolds, agriculture will face a series of challenges—in the United States and globally—in providing sufficient food, fiber, and fuel to support a growing global population while our natural resources, environmental health, and available arable land decline and climate changes. The unprecedented nature of these challenges creates a growing sense of urgency for transformative changes in agriculture to accelerate progress towards achieving sustainable agricultural systems that maximize production and economic return for producers, minimize environmental degradation, and adapt to changing climate. Achieving such a transformation requires an improved understanding of the complexities of how agro-ecosystems function at multiple scales (i.e., fields to watersheds or landscapes). Long-term research and data collection are essential to achieving this understanding; at stake are the security and safety of our food production systems, our natural resources, and our environment. Over the past 10 years, there have been frequent calls for the creation of a ‘Long-Term Agro-Ecosystem Research’ (LTAR) network, similar to the National Science Foundation‘s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, to provide a sophisticated platform for research on the sustainability of U.S. agricultural systems. The U.S. Department of Agriculture‘s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) currently maintains approximately 23 benchmark experimental watersheds and ranges that collect long-term data on agricultural sustainability, climate change, ecosystem services, and natural resource conservation at the watershed or landscape scale. Some of these sites have been collecting data for nearly a hundred years. Here we present a vision for how a subset of these sites could be used to form the core of an LTAR network. Eventually, such a network would link ARS sites with partner sites operated by universities, other research institutions, and (or) other Federal agencies to support multidisciplinary research and funding efforts addressing regional- and national-scale questions using shared research protocols. Such a long-term agroecosystem research network would provide the knowledge to substantially improve both agricultural sustainability and the delivery of ecosystem services to a society that increasingly demands that agriculture be safe, environmentally sound, and socially responsible, in addition to being productive and economically viable.