Design for Upgrade of an Existing Biological Field Station for Conducting Collaborative Ecological Research in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

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The Yellowstone Ecological Research Center (YERC) is a non-profit research and education organization that has a ten year history of operation using leased facilities that are no longer sufficient to support its activities. This award supports a field station planning effort that will be the initial step in a multi-year process leading to the further development of an important biological field station providing access to the greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE). Through meetings involving researchers and educators who use or will use the station, outside scientific advisors, regional representatives of federal agencies, and local leaders, the planning effort will provide a master plan that identifies programmatic goals for the YERC station and the permanent facilities needed to support those programmatic goals. The field station is expected to serve as a staging ground for field education opportunities that will support Native American college students from the seven upper Missouri tribes, plus underserved rural Americans from within the region. The GYE is the largest nearly intact ecosystem in the temperate, industrialized world. Because of its remarkable geological properties, research in the GYE can lead to important discoveries at levels ranging from the microscopic scale (e.g., thermophilic bacteria in hydrogeothermal waters) to the ecosystem scale (e.g., seasonal elk migrations in the Northern Range). The planning process will include scoping of facilities for classroom interactions between resident and visiting scientists with students at all levels (K-Postdoctoral). Beginning in 2005, college-aged tribal members and K-12 rural Montanans will have access to the Field Station through a separately funded education program. An important part of the field station planning process will be to define building and lands designs that facilitate smooth transitions between the field and the classroom.