Restoration Ecology

Science outreach and educational components

The OSUM Prairie Nature Center is an educational facility formed in 1988 to provide teaching and land management experience to OSU Marion students and provide campus and local residents a place to explore nature. Educational programs that will be affected by our research include:

•  The use of the OSUM Prairie as a science laboratory/classroom by OSU Marion undergraduate biology classes. This small regional campus serving a largely agricultural community has limited research facilities and students have many fewer opportunities to assist in research compared to their peers on the OSU Columbus campus. Many OSUM students are non-traditional in age or are the first members of their family to attend college. Our research includes many components appropriate for undergraduate involvement, such as assisting in vegetation data collection and preparing soil and plant samples for analysis. There has been extensive undergraduate involvement with pilot experiments at OSUM.

•  Science education for the general public. In 2002, 3,680 local primary school students received prairie tours. Other users included 4-H and Scout groups, home-schoolers, day-care classes, garden clubs, and nursing home residents, who together accounted for over 1,800 individual visits last year. For many of these visitors, our preliminary experiment was their first exposure to an actual scientific research project. We will develop this outreach element further, with interpretative signage and focused tour presentations of the garden and restoration experiments.

•  Special science education partnerships with area schools. This project and the study site are particularly well suited to augment science education in the OSUM 7-county service area. Biology/environmental science teachers at Elgin High School (Marion County) are interested in ecology research units for their biology and environmental science classes. Together with these teachers we will develop field exercises using our dedicated restoration plot replicate in which students will gather vegetation and soil data in a fashion analogous to that occurring in the adjacent restoration plots. Results will be posted to our web site and compared to data obtained by site scientists.