Konza Prairie Biological Station established its education program in 1996 for visitors and students interested in learning about the tallgrass prairie. With the Schoolyard LTER supplements (1998), programs for school children were developed to parallel the long-term ecological research on site and also to add information useful to scientists. Teachers participate in annual professional development workshops to learn about the prairie ecosystem, experience the protocols of several long-term scientific activities and choose one or more of these activities to add to their curriculum.

What mathematical skills, particularly in the area of reasoning about proportions, rate of change, and rate of growth are needed for a high school graduate to effectively use knowledge and tools from environmental science as an informed citizen in a democratic society? What are the quantitative reasoning stepping stones from elementary school through high school that might help develop this key to environmental science literacy?

Humans make decisions daily that impact biodiversity, and it is essential that citizens understand the implications of these decisions. Yet, ecological systems are extremely complex, with many details still being discovered. Our challenge is to identify the underlying principles and concepts governing the distribution of organisms, and then communicate these details to students in a way that influences their citizenship decisions as participants in local and global communities. 

This session is intended both for social and biophysical scientists who want to help develop a proposal for the kind of “multi-site, highly collaborative and integrated research initiative” envisioned by the LTER planning group. The focus will be on what the LTER planning process calls the “centerpiece” of the group's conceptual framework, as well as one of “Grand Challenges” to be addressed at the network level – “the dynamics of coupled human-natural ecosystems.”

The NSF MSP Culturally Relevant Ecology, Learning Progressions, and Environmental Literacy project focuses on the critical education juncture of middle through high school (grades 6-12).

Understanding biodiversity and the factors that govern it are important components of an environmental literacy framework. Yet, students rarely graduate from K-12 institutions with a robust understanding of biodiversity, particularly of their local ecosystems. Given the wealth of expertise in biodiversity science within the LTER network and education activities at LTER sites, we have the opportunity to build unique collaborations that continue to enhance ecological literacy.

For the last three years, scientists and educators from five LTER sites (AND, CAP, JRN, LUQ, and SGS) have collaborated on the NSF-funded Teaching Ecological Complexity Through Field Science Inquiry (Ecoplexity) Project. The purpose of the project is to provide resources and training for high school teachers that will allow them to engage in authentic field research studies with their students. Our goal for this working group is to help establish new partnerships with other LTERs seeking to use this model of teacher professional development and these existing web-based resources.

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) entered in 2004 in a five year cooperative agreement with LTER. The NBII-LTER cooperative agreement is the result of efforts championed by W. Michener dating back to 2000. The overarching goal is the interoperability of both networks: Sharing the wealth on information on ecological and biological resources, and offer those to educators,, scientists, lawmakers and the public in general.