The role and achievements of national ecology programs (NEON, LTER, REU) in diversifying the ecological workforce

Many ecologists recognize the urgency of bringing the full diversity of the American family into the community of scientists that identifies and frames environmental problems and into the community of partners and citizens that will solve these problems. Fortunately, this recognition and creative ideas for achieving this goal are being incorporated into plans for national initiatives in ecology and environmental science. For example, the vision for the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) includes an optimistic and ambitious goal of universal access to cutting edge data, and strategies that include fostering of community-science and citizen science partnerships, and attention to problems of concern to the general public. These are being incorporated explicitly for their potential for broad and diverse engagement.  Likewise, the Education, Outreach and Training Team’s report to the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) strategic planning group has as one of it’s four action goals: “Expand our community to reflect the diversity of our society and to include a broader range of skills, expertise, and disciplines.” The proposed LTER Diversity Initiative would begin with a self-study to determine the current status of diversity are within the LTER community, and then build new programs including targeted graduate and faculty fellowships, cross-site diversity field trips (building on the current LTER/SEEDS collaborative model), and an LTER Summer Bridge Program to support minority high school student during the transition to college. The successes of training programs such as the Undergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB) and Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs of NSF in recruiting and retaining a diversity of young scientists in the field are encouraging. Such data as is available from each of these programs will be presented, and lessons learned highlighted.