The ARC LTER research is strongly collaborative and typically involves multiple projects and investigators working on sites and especially on long-term, whole-system experiments that are established and maintained by the LTER project. In these collaborations the ARC LTER typically provides site maintenance as well as access to sites and experiments, maintenance and access to long-term data bases, and often the system-level conceptual framework and background data that allow a much richer interpretation of results of individual studies than would be possible in single-investigator research.
One of the key management challenges of the ARC LTER is to create a project structure that optimizes opportunities for synthesis among such a large, diverse, multidisciplinary group. To provide this structure we organize our research into four main components, focused on (a) terrestrial ecosystems, (b) streams, (c) lakes, and (d) landscape interactions.