The Shortgrass Steppe (SGS) LTER made its first appearance at Colorado State University's College of Agriculture's Ag Day on Saturday, September 8. Ag Day is held south of the CSU Stadium each September to coincide with a home football game. All the departments and many of the student associations in the College of Agriculture bring displays to showcase their activities for alumni and guests attending that day's game. This is accompanied by a barbecue that is based purely on Colorado products. It's a lively event and the weather was perfect for this year's activities.
Nicole Kaplan, Kim Melville-Smith, Caroline Yonker, and Sallie Sprague assembled and staffed a 'booth' with many of our educational tools, an abbreviated food web poster, a short description of the SGS LTER project, drawings of the new field station, laptop computers with the historical slide show from our 2007 SGS Symposium, samples of some of our most common plants (blue grama, buffalo grass and Opuntia cactus), an Olney soil profile, stuffed small mammals, pickled reptiles, and some of the tools of our trade. We had good attendance that often had all four of us talking to visitors at the same time. The pickled snakes (bull and rattle) were especially eye-catching and attracted many folks, young and old, to our booth.
University President Larry Penley was one of the visitors to our booth. He complimented the research completed by SGS LTER faculty, staff, students and associates, as well as our booth. President Penley was very interested in knowing how the plans for the new facility were progressing. Overall we felt that this was a very successful outreach effort and expect to attend Ag Day again next year.