ABSTRACT
Introduction Historically, environmental research has been conducted as small-scale studies involving one or a few investigators in a single discipline and funded for relatively short periods. Recently, increased understanding of small-scale environmental patterns and processes, coupled with burgeoning interest in landscape, regional and global patterns and processes, has led to the development and funding of studies addressing broad-scale, long-term questions. For example, the Long-Term Ecological Research Program (LTER), initiated by the National Science Foundation in the early 1980s, supports long-term investigations that could not be addressed effectively in the normal 1-3-year funding cycle of most US granting agencies (Franklin et al., 1990). These and related programmes generally involve experiments and monitoring lasting years, decades or
centuries (e.g., Harmon's (1992) 200-year study of log decomposition), and they frequently include many scientists from several disciplines.
