Table Of Contents
Our primary efforts with our LTER activities have been focused on research at the CPER. As in previous funding cycles, during the past 5 years essentially all of our efforts have been devoted to producing new scientific information about SGS ecosystems. Our outreach activities have been limited to sponsoring an annual symposium, education (undergraduate, and graduate), and communication to the public through the media when opportunities arose. This is not to say that we do not recognize the value or the importance of outreach activities. We have been working over past several years to develop resources that will allow us to increase our interactions with a number of publics that have an interest in the SGS. To date we have not been successful, but we will continue to pursue the issue until we are successful. Therefore, to date, our plans exceed our accomplishments but we hope to correct that in the future.
The Central Plains Experimental Range Annual Symposium:In 1994, we began cooperating with the Agricultural Research Service to sponsor an annual symposium with the goal of reaching out to the research, management, and user communities that have an interest in the shortgrass steppe. The all-day symposium is characterized by a high degree of interaction, through poster presentations, short plenary sessions, focal discussion groups, and even games that focus on the shortgrass steppe. We have just completed the 3rd symposium, which was attended by 90 people,including scientists and managers from the ARS, managers and scientific staff from the U.S. Forest Service Pawnee National Grasslands, the rancher president of the Crow Valley Grazing Association, and representatives of the academic community (professors, graduate and undergraduate students, and technical support staff). We are finding that each year, the symposium grows in both numbers of attendees and in excitement level. Further, our relationship with the ARS, U.S. Forest Service, and the livestock operators has improved markedly over the past 3 years, based upon a shared understanding of the ecology of the site and our priorities for new research. Our plan is to increase the scope of this symposium as we increase the size of our research site.
Education:During the past 5 years, we have increased our involvement in education, through increases in formal academic educational involvement at the site, and in numbers of fieldtrips led to the site. Each semester, we lead trips for at least one undergraduate and one graduate ecology class to the site to focus on the ecology and management of shortgrass steppe; these trips also feature visits to a local ranching operation. In the past 2 years, we have also begun to develop undergraduate research experiences through the REU program. We have leveraged support from several different grants to bring in 9 highly qualified undergraduates that include 5 CSU Honors students, 2 minority students, and 2 students from liberal arts institutions, working on projects on stable isotope studies, nematode populations, soil organic matter dynamics, plant ecophysiology, vegetation, soil respiration responses to warming treatments, mammal distributions, and prairie dog influences on raptors. One of these projects this past summer led to a result that we feel will be highly visible, that Opuntia polyacantha provides a refuge for plant species and significantly increases biological diversity in grazed grassland. We also supported two additional conservation biology undergraduate projects used for theses this past summer. These interactions have been very productive and exciting for the SGS group, and we plan to continue to encourage a great deal of undergraduate work at the site.
Field Trips:In the past several years, we have led numerous fieldtrips for interest groups to our research site. We have participated in the ARS Field Day, during which ranchers visit and learn about research at the site. We have led fieldtrips for the Sierra Club, for an educational group that works with Native Americans, and for the Soil Science Society of America.
Media Attention:We have been featured in regional and local newspapers several times since 1990. Both the New York Times and Washington Post covered our 1991 Nature article (Mosier et al. 1991) on the effects of management on trace gas flux in native steppe and croplands. The Fort Collins Coloradoan reported on the SGS research program in 1990, and our synthesis that grazing is a long-term part of the disturbance regime of this system. In 1992, the Coloradoan highlighted our regional modeling result (from an LTER supplemental grant) that global warming will have small impacts on regional C budgets relative to long-term cultivation. A series of articles in the Denver Rocky Mountain News in winter 1995 featured our combined research and educational program as a highlight at Colorado State University. This fall, one of our class fieldtrips to the site was featured in the Coloradoan.
In addition, there is recent interest in featuring the SGS LTER in an article in Nature Conservancy magazine and in a video being developed by the Denver Museum of Natural History. Both approached us for information that would support their topic of "The Disappearing Shortgrass Steppe". We look forward to working with these organizations during the next several months to educate their staff as well as the general public that the shortgrass steppe is surprisingly resistant because of its ecological history, and is currently in relatively good shape.
02/08/01