Education News

In September 2011, Megan McKenzie, a sophomore high school student, joined Jennifer Lau’s lab at the Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) Long Ter

In January 2012, six experienced teachers from the Harvard Forest (HFR) Schoolyard Ecology Program took part in a pilot Advanced Graphing Workshop at the Forest.

The Graduate Student Committee (GSC) spent the winter planning some exciting events for the coming season. Among the highlights:

With the help of an Adobe Connects virtual classroom, Kari O’Connell (AND) and Beth Simmons (CCE and PAL) coordinated the first cross-site virtual Research Experience for Teachers (RET) exchange this August.

The first camera-based observatory of phenological responses to climate change in a K-12 schoolyard is up and running. This year, HFR faculty member Andrew Richardson and long-time Schoolyard LTER teacher Kate Bennett assisted middle-school teacher JoAnn Mossman in purchasing and installing the camera as part of a continental-scale phenology monitoring, modeling and forecasting effort called PhenoCam, for which Richardson is an active developer. As a result, students at the Overlook Middle School in Ashburnham, MA, can now track seasonal budburst and leaf color change on a webcam overlooking their schoolyard’s forest canopy. The image data will complement the students’ on-the-ground, tree-based data collected through HFR LTER’s “Buds, Leaves, and Global Warming” Schoolyard Ecology project.

In fall 2011 the graduate student co-chairs, Sally Koerner and Kim La Pierre, plan to submit a proposal for a graduate student symposium to take place the day before the 7^th All Scientists Meeting (ASM) in September 2012.  Past graduate student symposiums have led to productive interactions between graduate students through career panel discussions, graduate student presentations on cross site work, and student-led and -organized working groups. 

Natasha Goss, a 14-year-old who worked with LTER mentors at the Niwot Ridge Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Colorado, has been awarded a 2011 Goldwater Scholarship for undergraduates.<

Kate Bennett, a 5th grade Schoolyard Ecology Teacher working with Harvard Forest LTER, has just published an article in the National Science Teacher Association’s journal, Science and Chil

Sally Koerner recently joined Chelse Prather as replacement for Amber Hardison in the Graduate Student Committee co-chair position.

The LTER network provides a unique opportunity to facilitate synthetic research across sites.