TITLE:    PALMER LTER: A Sampling Grid for the Palmer LTER Program
AUTHOR:   Kirk J Waters and Raymond C Smith
Palmer LTER Contribution #04

The Antarctic Long Term Ecological Research (LTER)
program will focus on the palegic marine ecosystem and the ecological
processes which link the extent of annual pack ice to the biological
dynamics of different trophic levels.
The Palmer LTER site is centered near Palmer Station, Anvers Island midway 
down the Antarctic Peninsula (64\(de40'S, 64\(de03'W) and will include
a long-term comprehensive measurement program of this ice dominated system.
Like other LTER's, the Palmer LTER will investigate phenomena that occur on 
time scales of years to decades in order to separate long-term (decadal)
systematic trends from interannual variability in physical conditions and
populations.
In order to structure our long-term monitoring we created a 
Sampling Grid analogous to the well known CalCOFI grid along the west coast 
of North America. 
The PalLTER Grid is west of the Antarctic Peninsula and covers an area of
900 km (roughly parallel to the peninsula) by 200 km (on to off-shore)
(Fig. 1).
Within this grid, cardinal lines spaced every 100 km along the peninsula
and cardinal points spaced every 20 km on to off-shore will comprise  
basic sampling stations (Table 1).
Inbedded within this \fIlarge-scale\fR or \fIpeninsula grid\fR is a
finer-scale grid specific to the immediate area of Palmer Station (Fig. 2,
Table 2).
It is anticipated that other investigators working in this area may wish
to reference their work to this PalLTER Grid as a long-term data base
is developed for this region.