The EcoTrends Project: Long-term, continental-scale ecological data for your classroom

Background/Question/Methods

Global change studies require comparing long-term ecological data within and across ecosystems. Long-term data have been collected in the US for up to a century or more across a diverse range of ecosystem types. These data include climatic and demographic data from the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, to more recent quantitative assessments of biodiversity, hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, and disturbance regimes. However, long-term data, especially biotic data, are often not easily accessible and comparable. Instead, they are often widely distributed, poorly documented, and structured in a multitude of formats, making comparison time-consuming and difficult, particularly in the undergraduate classroom.

The EcoTrends Project was initiated at the Jornada Basin LTER/USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range to provide a single large repository of standardized long-term data, freely available to researchers, students, land managers, and other interested parties for exploring, downloading and visualizing. 50 NSF- and USDA-supported sites, including 26 LTER sites participated in this endeavor. Datasets were accumulated, processed, standardized, and made accessible via a website (http://www.ecotrends.info) and a book (USDA ARS Publications, in press). These derived datasets represent a wide range of ecosystem types, from forests to grasslands and shrublands, freshwater lakes and streams, aridlands, and coastal regions, and encompass broad themes, including climate, biogeochemistry, human populations, and biotic structure.

Results/Conclusions

In 2008 and 2009, the evolving and yet-to-be-completed EcoTrends website was shared with undergraduate educators in ESA- and NEON-supported workshops as a potential tool for learning about continental-scale ecology through data exploration and comparison. As the educators explored the website, new ideas for classroom activities were developed and lessons about effective data presentation and analysis tools for students emerged. The current EcoTrends website, along with recommendations for making continental-scale data more easily accessible for students and educators in the future, will be shared in this presentation. These recommendations include 1) provide a separate interface for students and educators, including clear definitions of terms and concepts, examples of how to use the website to explore data, and tools for collaborative work, and 2) provide links to the original datasets with examples of how data were restructured into comparable forms to support teaching of data practices.