Network ecology and the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives: Integrating research and monitoring to address conservation and climate change.

We are entering a new era of network ecology - entities monitoring, assessing, and modeling phenomena across disciplines and broad extents. Government agencies including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Commerce all stress the importance of working across geographic and jurisdictional boundaries to address concerns about sustaining the services of natural and cultural systems in light of climate and land use change.  Collaborative, integrated research programs have become the norm to address complex ecological research questions. We have a convergence of philosophy among researchers, institutions, agency directors, and governing bodies of the importance of working across boundaries. A number of environmental research and monitoring networks either have a proven track record or are recently initiated. These include the LTER and NEON networks (26 sites and 20 domains respectively) supported by the National Science Foundation, the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (22 cooperatives), the Climate Science Centers (8 regional centers), the NOAA Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (11 regions), EPA air and water quality national monitoring networks, the National Weather Service, the Forest Service Experimental Forests and Ranges (80 sites), Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) and Forest Health Monitoring (FHM) programs, the USGS Gap Analysis Program, and the NRCS Soil Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) among others. These networks gather and analyse envirnonmental data, model future scenarios, and many have as a specific or implied goal the understanding and sustainability of natural and cultural systems for future generations. The Landscape Conservation Cooperatives, initiated by the Department of the Interior and supported by many state, federal, and nongovernmental sources are addressing the problem of how to get these networks interacting, sharing information, synthesizing, monitoring and predicting with the potential capacity of an integrated system that exceeds the capacity of any one network.