OOS 51-1
The origins and evolution of the Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN): One path to developing a grass roots ecological research network
The Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN) is a five-year project funded by the National Science Foundation Research Coordination Networks-Undergraduate Biology Education Program. Created by a team of faculty from 14 undergraduate institutions, EREN’s mission is to create and test models for collaborative ecological research that generate high-quality, publishable data involving undergraduate students and faculty across a continental-scale network of research sites. EREN is a “grass roots” scientific and education network, emerging out of the interests and initiatives of the ecological community, particularly those ecologists working at primarily undergraduate institutions (PUIs) who wanted to explore the potential for multi-site collaboration to enhance their teaching and research goals. This presentation introduces a series of talks within an Organized Oral Session focused on EREN’s work to date, and will discuss the motivation to create EREN, the history of the EREN concept and its links to earlier projects, the current EREN model for collaborative work at PUIs, and the challenges and rewards of building a grass roots network.
Results/Conclusions
EREN emerges from a fundamental interest in leveraging collaboration to enhance ecological research and teaching. Because PUIs have a strong teaching emphasis, PUI scientists often have limited time and resources for research, particularly for projects that incorporate multiple sites and large spatial scales. EREN suggests that PUI scientists can engage with these challenging ecological questions, and enhance their teaching, by including their single sites in large-scale coordinated experiments designed to include undergraduates as research partners. Having students collecting comparable data across multiple sites provides excellent opportunities to teach concepts of scale, data management, and analysis through a research lens. EREN has connections with other initiatives, past and present, that support coordinated research efforts across sites and scientists, including the Collaboration through Appalachian Watershed Studies (CAWS) project, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and other Research Coordination Network (RCN) projects, but has built its own model for leadership, project development, data sharing, and authorship. EREN’s evolution has demonstrated that building a productive and collegial network to support diverse projects requires attention to communication, technological tools for collaboration and data sharing, and significant time. We present EREN as a research/teaching model with significant strengths and invite critique for its further improvement.