Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) is a methodology for studying the evolutionary patterns of ecosystems over long timescales, emphasizing slow changes, responses to sudden events, historical cumulative effects, and biodiversity preservation. Inspired by the LTER research concept, this paper proposes a novel heuristic optimization algorithm—LTER-inspired Ecological Optimization (LTER-EO). This algorithm combines long-term ecosystem evolution, ecological memory, adaptation to sudden events, resource flow, and ecological network interaction mechanisms to form an original optimization strategy. This paper details the algorithm's design philosophy, mechanism, and mathematical model, and provides rich, plain-text mathematical formula descriptions. This algorithm has potential for wide-ranging applications, including continuous optimization, combinatorial optimization, and global search for multimodal problems.