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The value of scientists engaging with community members and other public audiences is widely recognized, and there is a growing literature devoted to the theory and practice of public engagement with science. However, as a group of professionals concerned with how public engagement is understood and practiced in the fields of ecology and environmental science, we see a need for accessible guidance for scientists who want to engage effectively, and for scientific leaders who want to support successful public engagement programs in their institutions. Here, we highlight six attributes of successful public engagement efforts led by scientists and scientific institutions: (1) strategic, (2) cumulative, (3) reciprocal, (4) reflexive, (5) equitable, and (6) evidence‐based. By designing and developing practices that incorporate these attributes, scientists and scientific organizations will be better poised to build two‐way linkages with communities that, over time, support science‐informed decision‐making in society and societally informed decision‐making in science. 

This is a set of Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site boundaries preserved as a shapefile. Note that for some sites “real” boundaries are included while others–particularly marine sites–use a simpler bounding box method. Each site is listed both with its three-letter abbreviation and its unabbreviated name. World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84) is the coordinate reference system used (EPSG:4326). More information about any of the sites can be found on the LTER Site Profiles page on the LTER Network website (https://lternet.edu/site). This data product was made possible by the contributions of the Information Managers for the LTER sites, each of whom contributed their sites' boundaries. 

Abstract The scale of ecological research is getting larger and larger. At such scales, collaboration is indispensable, but there is little consensus on what factors enable collaboration. In the present article, we investigated the temporal and spatial pattern of institutional collaboration within the US Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network on the basis of the bibliographic database. Social network analysis and the Monte Carlo method were applied to identify the characteristics of papers published by LTER researchers within a baseline of papers from 158 leading ecological journals. Long-term and long-distance collaboration were more frequent in the LTER Network, and we investigate and discuss the underlying mechanisms. We suggest that the maturing infrastructure and environment for collaboration within the LTER Network could encourage scientists to make large-scale hypotheses and to ask big questions in ecology.