RCN-UBE Incubator: The Campus as a Living Lab

College Of The Canyons, Santa Clarita CA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by increasing opportunities for undergraduate students at four-year and community colleges to engage in authentic and relevant STEM research. With the development of a native bee Campus as a Living Lab (CALL) research toolkit, the project will address two main barriers that faculty regularly face in doing so, limited time and resources. The CALL research toolkit will include materials and step-by-step instructions to initiate and expand the study of campus native bee biodiversity. All essential information will be developed in Spanish as well. Network faculty participants will receive training with the toolkit so that they can introduce students to biodiversity research on their respective campuses. With this easy-to-implement and low-cost toolkit, faculty and students can turn their campuses and nearby natural areas into research locations. This experience will increase students’ knowledge and awareness regarding native bee distribution, ecology, and to the science of habitat enrichment. Providing students this research opportunity will enhance student’s connection to their campus, professors, and fellow students, thereby increasing their sense of belonging and retention within STEM degree and career paths. The project's primary goal is to develop a network of faculty at community colleges and four-year institutions who incorporate native bee biodiversity research into their courses. Key objectives of this project include: 1) building the network of faculty, and 2) creating, beta testing, and refining the native bee Campus As a Living Lab (CALL)Toolkit. The PIs and steering committee members will develop and expand a nationwide network of community colleges and four-year institutions, representing geographically and ecologically varied locations. Developing a network with many two-year colleges who serve a high percentage of underrepresented students will achieve multiple goals, which include increasing opportunities for faculty to share information on best practices to institutionalizing research experiences into courses, strengthening the pathway for students to transfer to four-year institutions, and generating opportunities for collaboration among students and faculty. Native bee biodiversity data will be entered into public databases and will be shared among the network participants. Therefore, this research will contribute to native bee conservation on a local and global scale. The shared data base will make it possible to identify gaps in native bee species composition on campuses. These gaps could then be filled by using targeted habitat enrichment. In this way, the large landscape parcels on community college campuses can ultimately serve as habitat islands and corridors. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/). This project is also supported by the NSF HSI and IUSE: EHR programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.