The Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research (VCR/LTER) project is funded by the National Science Foundation. The VCR/LTER project's research activities focus on the mosaic of transitions and steady-state systems that comprise the barrier-island/lagoon/mainland landscape of the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Research is conducted in mainland marshes, the lagoon system behind the barrier islands, and on the islands themselves, particularly Hog Island. The VCR/LTER began operation in 1987. It initially focused on geophysical controls (e.g., storms) on coastal ecosystems. In 1992-1994 it broadened that focus to address the concept of ecological state change, which was linked in 1994-2000 to relationships between free surfaces (land, sea, freshwater table). More recent work (2000-2006), added a hypsometric perspective, which provides an alternate way of examining ecological patterns on the coastal landscape. It makes extensive use of the Virginia Coast Reserve of The Nature Conservancy.
The VCR/LTER is a member of the Long Term Ecological Research Network, and is administered by the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Virginia. Its field research headquarters is at the Anheuser-Busch Coastal Research Center of the University of Virginia in Oyster, Virginia.
Famous quotes containing the words virginia, coast, reserve, long-term, ecological and/or research:
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Her face had the seamed reserve of the old in this country [Japan]. It was a neighborhood poignantly rich in old ladies.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“The strongest and most effective [force] in guaranteeing the long-term maintenance of ... power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.”
—Maurice Godelier (b. 1934)
“It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Our science has become terrible, our research dangerous, our findings deadly. We physicists have to make peace with reality. Reality is not as strong as we are. We will ruin reality.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)