Education News

This past summer I had the opportunity to take part in a life-changing research experience at Harvard University’s Harvard Forest. My research was on forest microbial communities and how they are being affected by climate change. My mentor and I compared data from long-term soil warming plots at the Forest as well as data collected by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). We then processed our data against various databases to identify the genes being expressed among the microbial communities. This new knowledge will help us understand the microbes’ role in cycling greenhouse gases.

I am an undergraduate student volunteering in Dr. Jennifer Rehage's lab at the Florida Coastal Everglades (FCE) LTER site and one of only two FCE undergraduates to attend the 2012 All Scientists Meeting (ASM) in Estes Park, Colorado.

The Graduate Student Symposium (GSS) at the 2012 All Scientists Meeting (ASM) was a resounding success.  The GSS took place one day before ASM officially started, and included about 150 graduate students from across the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network, about three quarters of whom were attending their first ASM.  We had a great time getting to know each other and learned a lot throughout the day. 

We would like to announce an exciting new initiative to encourage cross-site collaborations and connect graduate students across the LTER network.  The LTER Graduate Students now have a blog, http://longtermresearch.blogspot.com/, where graduate students from across the network will be posting stories about their research, their experience at LTER sites, and other interesting observations touching on their life as LTER grad students.  The blog will be active throughout the year, so bookmark us and check in regularly to hear from the graduate students!

Graduate Students! We are looking forward to the Graduate Student Symposium at the All-Scientists Meeting on September 9, 2012 in Estes Park, CO.

As technology advances, collecting large amounts of data becomes easier than ever.  One of the challenges facing modern scientists is how to make these data easily accessible and understandable to non-scientist audiences. 

“Spending a night in the Everglades is an unforgettable experience,” says Laurel Larsen, author of One Night in the Everglades, the latest book in the growing LTER Schoolyard Book Series..

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

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

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.