elementary students and undergraduates peer into a sea life tank
Undergraduate interns at the REEF learn how to communicate with elementary students. Credit: SBC LTER.

Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Education Program — referred to as “Schoolyard LTER” — is dedicated to developing and sharing best practices in training, teaching, and learning about the Earth’s ecosystems. Each site receives an education supplement, the impact of which is magnified many times through partnerships with local museums and non-profit organizations, environmental educators, and school systems.

Because LTER sites are able to maintain a persistent presence in the community over many years, researchers and education specialists are able to develop long-lasting relationships with local and regional educators and their students. Working in partnership with teachers and university faculty, site-based educators develop science curriculum materials that draw on the sites’ extensive data resources, provide immersive research experiences for teachers and undergraduate students, and give many curious young minds their first chance to poke around in nature and start finding their own answers.

Data Literacy

LTER data provides many examples of how to find, organize, clean, analyze and plot real data while also being accessible to even young students, who can easily grasp the meaning of changes in plant and animal populations, for example. The Data Nuggets program (developed at the Kellogg Biological Station LTER site) disseminates free classroom activities, co-designed by scientists and teachers and derived from authentic science research projects, that provide opportunities to look for patterns in the data and to develop explanations about natural phenomena using the scientific data from the study.

Data Jams meld data analysis skills with creative activities, making learning especially fun and accessible for middle-school students.


Education Stories from across the Network

  • LTER Road Trip: Marine research and education meet at the UCSB Marine Science Institute

    LTER Road Trip: Marine research and education meet at the UCSB Marine Science Institute

    Tucked into an absolutely beautiful piece of the UC Santa Barbara campus, the Research Experience and Education Facility (REEF) sits at the edge of both the Pacific Ocean and the UCSB Lagoon. Inside, tanks full of marine creatures—including one with tropical species characteristic of a research site in French Polynesia—sit bubbling away while student interns……

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  • LTER Road Trip: Teaching the Next Generation of Ecologists

    LTER Road Trip: Teaching the Next Generation of Ecologists

    Nate Vandiver arrived at the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) offices early on a Friday morning. Pulling on knee-length boots over his long work pants, he helped gather sampling equipment and load it into a van for a day of stream monitoring. Vandiver is a high school senior at the Friends School of Baltimore, and at……

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  • 2017 REU opportunities

    2017 REU opportunities

    NSF funds a large number of research opportunities for undergraduate students through its Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites Program. The REU program allows for active research participation by undergraduate students in any of the areas of research funded by the National Science Foundation. Each student is associated with a specific research project, where he/she……

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  • Baltimore Public Schools to Incorporate BES Science

    Baltimore Public Schools to Incorporate BES Science

    The Baltimore Ecosystem Study will be incorporating LTER data into Baltimore Public Schools chemistry curriculum. The newly designed Integrating Chemistry and Earth science (ICE) unit infuses Earth science into chemistry at the high school level; it will be taught to every student taking chemistry this year. ICE aligns with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS),……

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  • Art and Humanities LTER Programs Build Empathy for Nature

    Art and Humanities LTER Programs Build Empathy for Nature

    Do arts and humanities programs at LTER sites further the Network’s mission? Recent research posits that art-humanities-science collaborations generate empathy – and associated emotions like inspiration, awe, and wonder – for the natural world. This empathy then drives society to engage with and care more broadly about nature.

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  • Desert Data Jam Award Winners

    Desert Data Jam Award Winners

    The Desert Data Jam is a unique competition that challenges students to make creative projects (such as songs, physical models, children’s stories, infographics, and games) that convey complex ecological data to nonscientists. In this sixth year of the Desert Data Jam, more than 400 students participated. The top five projects from each participating class were……

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  • Beyond Citizen Science: Local Observations of Climate Change Impacts Guide Vulnerability Research

    Beyond Citizen Science: Local Observations of Climate Change Impacts Guide Vulnerability Research

    Unstable ice. Raging rivers. Fire-scorched landscapes. Deep within Alaska’s Yukon River Basin, residents faced with these obstacles during travel or hunting trips now use camera-enabled GPS units to send photographs to researchers across the state. Scientists at the Bonanza Creek LTER and University of Alaska, Fairbanks are using the images, along with the associated GPS……

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  • Adventure is Out There: Pokémon and Wildlife Await

    Adventure is Out There: Pokémon and Wildlife Await

    You’ve probably heard about Pokémon Go, the recent craze that has captured America and the world. After stealing the hearts of children over a decade ago, Pokémon are back — this time in our smartphones. People of all ages are tracking rare Pokémon, trying to “catch ’em all”. But what about interaction with the world that exists…

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  • Distributed Graduate Seminar on Ecological Theory and Long Term Research

    Distributed Graduate Seminar on Ecological Theory and Long Term Research

    Following on the Ecological Theory working group at the 2015 All Scientists Meeting, please find attached an updated syllabus for a Fall 2016 distributed graduate seminar. The seminar series will engage scientists from key theoretical fields of ecology to speak about how long term research informs the evolution of that theory. Each week we will……

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Read all LTER education stories