Two forest management objectives being debated in the context of federally managed landscapes in the US Pacific Northwest involve a perceived trade-off between fire restoration and C sequestration. The former strategy would reduce fuel (and therefore C) that has accumulated through a century of fire suppression and exclusion that has...
Quantifying and modeling processes involved in the global carbon cycle is important to evaluate the temporal and spatial variability of these processes and understand the effect of this variability on future response to changing climate and land use patterns. Biomass accumulation and Net Primary Productivity (NPP) are large components of...
The Andrews Forest Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site has a long-term partnership with the University of Oregon Environmental Leadership Program (ELP), providing service-learning opportunities for undergraduate students to facilitate field trips for middle school students to the Andrews LTER site. Undergraduate students develop field trip lessons based on Andrews Forest...
The STEM Research Center at Oregon State University was invited by Guerilla Science and Pratt Institute to evaluate the professional development experiences for two cohorts of science and art professionals. Each professional development experience consisted of a three-day workshop and field experience in August and September 2019. We used workshop...
Environmental education programs seek to foster an appreciation for the natural world while introducing students to scientific thinking. Citizen science engages non-scientists in the systematic collection and analysis of data. The Betts Forest Landscape Ecology Lab combines both goals by inviting teachers in Corvallis, Oregon, and surrounding areas to participate...
Windthrow has been studied extensively as a cause of mortality and as a landscape
disturbance agent in temperate forests throughout the United States. The effects of
windthrow mortality on stand species composition and structure, forest regeneration and
seral development have been well described at the site (e.g. single gap) and...
Creative projects at the interface of science and art can be appealing to both science-interested and art-interested audiences. They therefore present a unique opportunity to connect with cultural and learning identities of a wide range of people, and to preach beyond the already-interested and science-engaged “choir” that make up a...
The Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning was invited by the Oregon State University Extension Service 4-H Youth Development and the Portland Metro STEM Partnership to evaluate Year 2 of the STEM Beyond School (SBS) project. The STEM Beyond School project seeks to improve underserved youth’s access to and...
This report serves the formative evaluation of ARC-Learn. The goal of this document is to support the use of evidence to inform programmatic changes and improvements for year two of the program, during which time Cohort One will complete its second year and Cohort Two will complete its first year...
The main research goal for this study was to describe how investment into the Hubs has influenced local STEM communities; that is, how STEM Hubs have begun to create opportunities for partnerships, collaboration, connected programing, improved program development or delivery, or improved communication within and outside the STEM teaching and...