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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.