Arts and Humanities Efforts in the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network: Understanding Perceived Values and Challenges - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 245

and written work has been produced by affi liated LTER sites, examples of which
have been displayed at: NSF headquarters in Washington DC in 2013; the 2012
Ecological Society of America meeting in Portland, Oregon; the 2012 LTER All-
Scientists Meeting in Estes Park, Colorado; and in galleries across the country, as
well as published in Orion and Terrain.org .

16.3 Survey

To date, however, there has been no systematic analysis of the arts and humanities
work emerging across the LTER network. Therefore we have employed a cross-site,
social scientifi c analysis to understand the extent and nature of this work and to
assess perceptions about the values and challenges associated with it. In May 2013
we received a grant from the LTER Network Offi ce to explore three guiding
questions:

1. What kind of arts and humanities inquiry exists across the Network and where is
it taking place?
2. What is the perceived value of this work?
3. What are the perceived challenges to maintaining or further developing arts and
humanities inquiry across the LTER Network?

In August 2013 we sent all 24 LTER Principal Investigators a Qualtrics online
survey ( http://www.qualtrics.com/ ), and encouraged them to use the personnel at
their site to respond. The instrument consisted of 14 Likert-scale, draggable bar, and
optional short answer questions. It took the respondents between 5 and 25 min to
complete. Our response rate was 100 %.

16.3.1 What Kind of Arts and Humanities Work Exists

Across the Network and Where Is It Taking Place?

Through anecdotal evidence, we assumed that perhaps 50 % of the 24 LTER sites
had hosted some kind of arts and humanities inquiry. When we asked participants
how their site engaged with arts and humanities inquiry— Not at all, Sporadically,
Consistently— only three sites answered Not at all. Already the survey was revealing
(Fig . 16.1 ).
Twenty-one of 24 sites have engaged with arts and humanities inquiry in some
way. Six sites reported hosting this type of interdisciplinary inquiry consistently,
including: (i) a long-running writers-in-residence program at the H.J. Andrews
Experimental Forest in Oregon, (ii) an ongoing Arts and Ecology research experi-
ence for undergraduates (REU) program at Sevilleta LTER in New Mexico, (iii) Art
and Ecology workshops for public school art teachers and an artist-in-residence