We used a youth focused wild berry monitoring program that spanned urban and rural Alaska to test this method across diverse age levels and learning settings.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Katie SpellmanDouglas CostChristine Villano
Plants with persistent fleshy fruits that last throughout fall and into winter and spring are an important source of nutrition for animals and people in boreal, subarctic, and arctic regions, but little information on fruit retention or loss is available for these regions. We evaluated fruit loss for four species across Alaska using data from our Winterberry community science network.
The goal of this evaluation was to determine how museum visitors responded to the museum's existing live animal exhibits and identify recommendations for their new Live Animal Garden exhibit.
An adapted three-dimensional model of place attachment is proposed as a theoretical framework from which place-based citizen science experiences and outcomes might be empirically examined in depth.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Julia ParrishYurong HeBenjamin Haywood
Researchers and practitioners have identified numerous outcomes of place-based environmental action (PBEA) programs at both individual and community levels (e.g., promoting positive youth development, fostering science identity, building social capital, and contributing to environmental quality improvement). In many cases, the primary audience of PBEA programs are youth, with less attention given to lifelong learners or intergenerational (e.g., youth and adult) partnerships. However, there is a need for PBEA programs for lifelong learners as local conservation decisions in the United States
Environmental educators have used guided-inquiry in natural and supportive learning environments for decades, but comparatively little programming and research has focused on experiences in urban environments, including in constructed ecosystems like green roofs, or impacts on older youth and adults. To address this gap, we designed a tiered, near-peer research mentoring program called Project TRUE (Teens Researching Urban Ecology) and used a mixed-methods approach to evaluate impacts on undergraduates serving as research mentors. During the 11-week program, undergraduates conducted
This poster was presented at the 2021 NSF AISL Awardee Meeting.
Free-choice learning occurs when individuals make choices about what, where, how, and who they participate with in their self-motivated learning activities. This project explores how different people, living in the same geographic region, make plants and gardening a part of their lives. We explore how adult community members choose to participate in their plant and gardening interests, including: the topics and activities that interest them, with whom they participate, where, and which resources they access. This work will
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Elysa CorinJudy KokeDavid MeierAllison HuEric Jones
This is the final evaluation report from RMC Research Corp. for the PES@LTERs project. Appendix includes instruments.
RMC Research designed evaluation activities to provide formative and summative feedback to Harvard Forest and the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation (Hubbard Brook) on their plan to embed public engagement with science (PES) into the cultures and practices of Long-Term Ecological Research Sites (LTERs) in the northeastern US. The purpose of this project was to build PES mechanisms into long-term ecosystem studies that create on-going, open exchanges between scientists and