The KBS LTER site is in a diverse, rural-to-semirural landscape typical of the U.S. Great Lakes and upper Midwest regions. Research at KBS asks how diverse plants, animals, and microbes in agricultural landscapes can contribute to farm productivity, environmental performance, and profitability. We study annual and perennial crops including corn, soybean, and wheat rotations, forage crops such as alfalfa, and biofuel crops such as poplars, switchgrass, and native successional communities.

 The Luquillo Schoolyard LTER program has adopted a pipeline model to guide the development and implementation of outreach activities from K12 to graduate education. At each level students are provided with authentic LTER experiences and encouraged to continue in the field of ecology research. At the middle school level, LUQ provides the Journey to El Yunque program as a free, bilingual, web-based curriculum in ecology. It uses the context of the LUQ research on hurricane disturbance to teach students about basic concepts in ecology.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) education mission is to enable society and the scientific community to use ecological information and forecasts to understand and effectively address critical ecological questions and issues.

SEEDS is a program of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) and is the only national mentoring program for undergraduate students dedicated to the field of ecology.  At its inception in 1996, SEEDS focused on faculty development in HBCUs and in 2002, turned to serve underrepresented students directly through field trips, scholarships, and leadership development. Today, SEEDS has 53 campus chapters. The poster discusses achievements of SEEDS, the challenges of implementing a mentoring program and possible solutions.

The LTER Decadal Plan outlined a number of important and visionary Education goals and activities towards building  the intellectual capacity for integrative research which emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration and synthesis.

Resilience has matured substantially as a system concept since Holling first applied the concept to ecological systems (Holling 1973). The literature has developed exponentially in the last quarter-century (Jansson et al.). It has been extended to apply to social systems (Westley et al. 2002) and to social-ecological systems. Finally it has been increasingly integrated into other literatures such as vulnerability analysis and sustainability science (e.g., Turner et al. 2003, Clark et al. 2003) and included in policy documents that address societal responses to climate change.

This Working Group session is offered by the newly NSF-funded LTER Math-Science-Partnership (MSP) Pathways to Environmental Literacy project. Presentations by panelists at this session address topics at the intersection of science teaching and learning and the myriad issues of citizenship, equity, diversity, and place. The focus areas of the Pathways project are: Biodiversity, the Water Cycle, and the Carbon Cycle.

More than any other single skill, the ability to read and read well allows children to succeed in school, learn about the world, and function in society (National Children's LIteracy). The Schoolyard Children's Book Series is a creative outreach approach for connecting and understanding LTER ecology and environmental science at any site. This informational workshop will brainstorm on the major objectives for the Schoolyard Children's Book Series and share handouts on program specifics for those interested in writing a children's book.

 The decadal plan for the LTER emphasized the need to develop an environmental science literacy framework around learning progressions within core science and mathematics concepts complemented with citizenship.  In response to this charge we developed a cross-site collaboration funded by the NSF Mathematics and Science Partnership program to (a) engage teachers around four LTER sites (BES, KBS, SBC, and SGS) in long-term professional development; (b) develop frameworks and assessments for learning progressions leading to environmental science literacy for carbon cycli

The Schoolyard LTER program supports a wide range of education outreach activities to K12 schools. One way that many sites have adopted is supporting students from local schools in the collection of long-term data near their schools. A recurring problem for sites that support school-level, long-term data collection is the storage and maintenance of the student level data. In many ways, the difficulties that the Schoolyard program has mirror the information management issues that the LTER program has faced throughout its history.