EN668 Summer Transect 2021 group photo courtesy G. Matthias (URI)

EN661 Winter Transect 2021 group photo courtesy E. Peacock (WHOI)

EN657 Fall Transect 2020 group photo by Lynne Butler (URI)

12 investigators
from 5 organizations

12 investigators
from 5 organizations

What is the NES-LTER?

The Northeast U.S. Shelf (NES) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project integrates observations, experiments, and models to understand and predict how planktonic food webs impact the productivity of higher trophic levels, including fish, seabirds and marine mammals.

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Woman talking to children looking through microscope, colored banners behind her.

Party for the Planet 2026

Every Earth Day, the Buttonwood Park Zoo in New Bedford, MA hosts a “Party for the Planet”. The NES-LTER has hosted a table of fun outreach activities for families each year, involving grad students, research associates, and scientists (+ their families) for many years. From IFCB image matching, doing a “thumb count” from catching an…

Co-PI, Mei Sato, Shares and Catches Fish with Sound

A large part of the NES-LTER project’s K-12 education efforts are through data sharing and supporting data literacy. Our Data Jam is just a part of that effort. Co-PI Mei Sato and Education Outreach Coordinator, Annette Brickley, worked through several iterations of bioacoustic data visualizations and filtering to co-create a new product, a Data Nugget!…

Team members shared research under a tent.

Strolling Through Woods Hole

Brett, Joel (not pictured), Kate and her son hosted a tent as part of the Woods Hole Science Stroll to share about our work. Over 2000 visitors learned about forage fish, our transect line and seasonal work, and helped create a dataset quipu showing warming ocean temperature and how that affects fisheries species like lobsters.…

Former REU Publishes Research

S. Alejandra Castillo Cieza was an REU in Co-PI Rachel Stanley’s chemistry lab at Wellesley College in 2020 and 2021. It wasn’t just a pandemic pushing Alejandra to dig deeper into data analysis and lab work. She’s driven to unraveling data-driven stories and sharing them as she is now pursuing her PhD in Biology at…

Undergraduate students present research on the Northeast U.S. Shelf ecosystem

This summer the Northeast U.S. Shelf Long-Term Ecological Research (NES-LTER) project hosted three undergraduate researchers in Woods Hole. All three presented posters at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)’s annual summer student poster symposium held on August 10, 2023. Victoria Abunaw, a rising senior in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, participated in WHOI’s Summer…

Data Portals

The NES-LTER produces observational data, derived data products, and model data. Observational data are obtained in real-time from moored underwater instruments, underway and from sampling on research cruises, and post-cruise with laboratory analyses.