New Graduate Student's Guide to the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER

Welcome

Welcome to the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER site! The LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) program has much to offer you in the form of data, tools and facilities. The collaborative nature of LTER research is somewhat different from purely individual research. You'll be sharing facilities and resources with other students from at least six other universities. We hope this page will help you to fully exploit your time as a VCR LTER Researcher.

First Steps

There are several things that need to be taken care of now that you are a researcher a the site. These include:

Add yourself to the VCR LTER Personnel Directory - for this you will need to know your email address. Adding you to the directory will assign you an LTERNET ID consisting of the first letter of your first name followed by your last name (all lower case). Thus, "John Doe" would have LTERNET ID "jdoe". This ID is important because it is used in all our other databases.
Become familiar with the goals and objectives of the VCR/LTER so you can see how your research fits in. Good sources of information are our proposals and research summaries on our Electronic Volumes Page. There is also a good summary document from the 1997 NSF Review of the site. You can learn more about LTER sites in general and access the home pages of other LTER sites on the LTERNET home page.
You will also need to prepare a Project Description for your work. This outlines what you intend to do, where you plan to do it and the expected impact on the site resulting from your use. You will want to coordinate production of your Project Description with your major professor. In addition to use by the VCR/LTER, it is used by the land owner, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to assess possible conflicts with their management objectives. Note that no field work should begin until a project description is in place!. You can submit Project Descriptions using an online form at on the VCR LTER Database Administration Page.
For research trips to the shore, you will need to add entries to the VCR/LTER Electronic Calendar. Funds for reimbursement of travel to the shore will not be issued for trips that do not appear in the calendar. If you are going to use a boat, you will also need to send email to "boats@mail.evsc.virginia.edu."

Final Steps

Once you are on the home-stretch of your research, remember that we need the following:

Copies of your thesis and graphics in both electronic and paper forms. Submission instructions for electronic text and graphics (as well as other data) are available.
Copies of your Data: you benefited from data resources provided by previous graduate students. Pass on the baton and submit your data on the VCR LTER Database Administration Page. Check out the Submission instructions for data to find out what forms are best for submitting and to avoid some pitfalls. Contact the VCR LTER Information Manager with any questions.

Down the Road

Graduate students are expected to make prompt efforts to publish their work. This assures that their results are available to other researchers on the site and the world at large. Posting thesis text on the WWW is no replacement for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Because of the importance of publication in the scientific process, the VCR/LTER recommends to its PIs that they reach an agreement with their graduate students that, if the student has not submitted a manuscript to a journal within 2 years following their graduation, the PI will prepare and submit a manuscript which includes the student as a co-author.