Bonanza Creek Schoolyard LTER Establishing A Bonanza Creek Schoolyard LTER Program

Background

The vast majority of the lands and waters of Alaska are devoted to natural resource production or the maintenance, study, or protection of the natural environment. Alaska residents rank near the top of the nation in knowledge of environmental sciences and technology in particular, which are major concerns of public policy, culture, and economic life in the state. Alaska Native communities and institutions need members and employees well educated in science to successfully conduct their traditional activities and business in the contemporary environment. Subsistence hunting and fishing, for example, have to be carried out today in the context of land and resource management plans, public debate about sustainable harvest levels, and issues such as environmental change and predator control. As a result of this educational background, the Bonanza Creek LTER has a special opportunity to successfully apply the Schoolyard LTER initiative.

Bonanza Creek LTER is located within the Fairbanks North Star Borough (FNSB). The FNSB School District operates 3 high schools, 4 middle schools, and 19 elementary schools (grades K through 6), and passes through funds for 2 charter schools. Total FNSB School District enrollment is 16,431 students, staff totals 1,718, and the 1997-98 budget was $118,810,000. Two private high schools operate in the FNSB. Teacher education and certification programs at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) have forged many links between the Fairbanks educational community and elementary and secondary education statewide. In particular, Fairbanks serves as a hub for rural Alaskans whose schools are generally not connected to the road system. Students from the two high schools closest to UAF have compiled an outstanding record in the Alaska and National High School Science Symposium and the state Science Fair. The International Arctic Research center (IARC), scheduled to open on the UAF campus in October 1998, has already launched a pilot phase of projects that have included science education at the elementary and secondary level.

Strong science, research, and outreach programs at UAF (a Land Grant, Sea Grant, and Space Grant institution) have resulted in a number of NSF-funded science education projects in Fairbanks area schools or based in Fairbanks with a statewide mandate (Figure 1). We propose to take advantage of the existing university-level science and K-12 classroom linkages by nesting our Schoolyard LTER as a project within these already operating programs.

Goals

The Schoolyard LTER program provides opportunities for a range of educational activities from instruction on units of measure used in science and taking accurate, repeatable measurements in a time series to intensive mentoring of high school students in advanced placement classes (Figure 2). We propose to encourage a range of activities along this spectrum, with the balance among activities reflecting classroom teacher and student initiative. Much like the LTER Network itself, schools will have varying levels of interest, depth or kind of science background among teachers, and logistic or field opportunities. At this stage in exploring the application of the LTER concept in the elementary and secondary setting, rather than trying to operate a uniform program we propose to reach out to schools with information about LTER and then respond to the initiative from schools (Figure 1).

The following are goals of the Bonanza Creek Schoolyard LTER project:

• Increase the number of K-12 students exposed to ecological sciences.
• Provide opportunities and connections for mentoring students particularly interested in ecological sciences.
• Collect LTER data sets.
• Gain experience in applying LTER paradigm to K-12 educational setting.
• Coordinate LTER educational outreach with other NSF-funded science education programs in Alaska.

Activities at the beginning end of the spectrum (Figure 2) are suitable to be conducted by an entire class, and thus provide an introduction to science, and ecological science in particular, to a broad cross-section of students. At the more advanced levels individual mentoring relationships will be fostered. A standard of usefulness will be applied to data collection efforts. That is, rather than collect a series of measurements purely for the sake of practice or experience, Bonanza Creek LTER co-PIs will identify data that would be useful in actual long-term monitoring. Because this is a first attempt to apply the LTER approach in the elementary and secondary educational setting, we can expect to learn important lessons about how to go about the task. Finally, in an educational setting with many science education projects as the current one in Fairbanks and in Alaska, coordination is an important goal.

Methods

We propose to fund an outreach effort that would send two LTER representatives working with both LTER researchers and district teachers. The LTER representatives would coordinate with Bonanza Creek LTER Co-Principal Investigators. LTER Co-Principal Investigators will identify data collection projects, suitable for hands-on volunteers, that would produce data useful in LTER projects. The LTER representatives, in appropriate cases accompanied by Co-Principal Investigators, would familiarize school faculty and staff with the LTER program and solicit projects. Examples of potential Schoolyard LTER projects might include:

• Plant phenology (timing of plant growth, flowering, senescence)
• Insect species collections and population monitoring
• Weather data collection (especially soils)
• Forest stand demography
• Web page development for publishing results
• Soda lime soil respiration experiment
• tree-ring collection and analysis
• Bird migration patterns and phenology

Criteria for evaluating Schoolyard LTER projects would include (A) What educational goals does the activity serve? (B) How does the activity serve LTER purposes? (C) Does the project contribute to a range of activities - from basics of taking measurements to student projects in advanced-placement classes? Schools that have an adopted project could choose to conduct the measurements on the school grounds, or to identify a nearby suitable natural resource property (park, managed forest, wildlife area) where the measurements would be taken. The Fairbanks area has several public natural resource properties within the urban area, including several where experimental manipulation of the environment is possible (Figure 3). Supplies and measurement devices would be provided from existing classroom or LTER sources.

Evaluation

Concepts and ideas for appropriate evaluation instruments will be developed. The basic criterion will be: are the students that participate in Schoolyard LTER measurably affected compared to students who are not involved? Because only a modest level of support is available for this initial phase of the application of the LTER concept in a new setting, a comprehensive instructional evaluation is not appropriate at this stage.

Relationship to other LTER activities

Since 1996 Bonanza Creek LTER has increased its emphasis on the task of regionalization - taking the findings and insights obtained from research within the boundaries of the LTER site and testing or applying them at the regional level or addressing whole research issues whose minimum scale is larger than the LTER itself (Figure 4). An ongoing Schoolyard LTER program would (A) increase the total activity with an enlarged group of collaborators, (B) provide valuable replication and (C) capture geographic diversity important for some measurements.