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About Us

NGA LTER: Northern Gulf of Alaska, Long Term Ecological Research

diagram
Overlapping relationships in the NGA

The LTER program is an NSF-funded network of 28 sites nationwide with long and rich histories of sustained data collection and experimentation.

The NGA site has its own complex history of oceanographic sampling along the Seward Line transect and at the Gulf of Alaska mooring site (GAK1). These studies have been supported by many funding agencies and programs over the years.

NGA LTER Components

The goals of the LTER Network aim to ensure that research results spread outward via education and publicly accessible databases. Therefore, NGA LTER program supports the following three components:

Research

Our research team will investigate the features, mechanisms, and processes that drive NGA ecosystem production and foster its resilience. NGA LTER research will illuminate marine ecosystem responses to environmental variability. This includes how seasonal and decadal variability in nutrients, light, temperature, freshwater, and wind influences productivity and promotes ecosystem resilience.

Information Management

Axiom Data Science provides our data management via a system developed and supported by its partner, AOOS. Axiom and AOOS maintain a DataONE member node and the Gulf of Alaska Data Portal through which data will be publicly available within a year of collection.

Education

Because opportunities are limited for students and teachers to directly experience the Gulf of Alaska, our Schoolyard Program will develop Virtual Field Trips that take students into the field to learn about the NGA ecosystem and meet the scientists. Virtual field trips for the LTER project will include videos, scientist interviews, information about the project hypotheses and methods, and middle school lesson plans. Additional materials will be distributed through our project website, the LTER Network website, and Alaska Sea Grant’s Alaska Seas and Watersheds website.

Site Organization

The NGA site’s organization reflects the union of LTER components (Research, Information Management, and Education), our partner programs, and our efforts to support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The figure below summarizes these elements. Please refer to the personnel page, for contact information for the people listed.

NGA Org Chart
Organizational chart for the NGA LTER site, February 2024