EREN is pleased to announce a partnership with the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. DBI-2037827) to develop joint projects for flexible learning during the pandemic. We have developed ecological projects that link the EREN distributed collaborative research model with NEON’s continental-scale datasets so that students and faculty at multiple sites can collect data either on campus or in their own backyards while social distancing. The local datasets can be compared across sites or with broader regional patterns to answer real ecological questions while building students’ skills in data science.
Four EREN-NEON Flexible Learning Projects have been developed and we are now hosting a program in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021 to incubate new project ideas that combine the EREN approach with NEON data.
The four projects are:
Plants in the Human-Altered Environment (PHAE) Project led by Dr. Jason Kilgore (Washington & Jefferson College) and Dr. Karen Kuers (The University of the South)
Backyard Beetles + Pollinators led by Dr. Kaitlin Stack Whitney (Rochester Institute of Technology)
Mosquito Surveys Along Anthropogenic Impact Gradients led by Dr. Allison Parker (Northern Kentucky University)
Lichens in Diverse Landscapes led by Dr. Danielle Garneau (SUNY Plattsburgh), Dr. Matthew Heard (Belmont University), and Dr. Mary Beth Kolozsvary (Siena College)
Visit each link above to learn more about these projects, or to see descriptive summaries of all projects on one page, click here.
To access the online student and faculty assessment surveys for these projects, click here.
If you used one or more projects in your classes in Fall 2020, please document that you did so with this short survey.
Zoom Training Webinars for each project were recorded (with closed captioning) and archived at the project sites linked above if you wish to view them.