Research Experience for Undergraduates Site on Sustainable Land and Water Resources--A Community-Based Participatory Research Experience for Undergraduates

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The PIs have been granted an NSF award to implement an REU Site focused on Sustainable Land and Water Resources. The goal of this REU Site will be to introduce undergraduate students to key elements of research on land and water resources essential to improving management practices, with a focus on Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and diverse interdisciplinary research teams. Students, divided into three teams, will conduct research that integrates Earth-surface dynamics, geology, hydrology and other disciplines. Research teams will be hosted by two Native American communities (Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes and Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa) and the University of Minnesota to work on projects developed in collaboration with the tribes' resource management divisions. This REU Site will incorporate an interdisciplinary team-oriented approach that emphasizes quantitative and predictive methods, CBPR, indigenous research methods, and traditional ecological knowledge. The REU Site will encourage participation by underrepresented students and students who are unsure about how they fit into the world of science to pursue STEM careers. The PIs expect that at least 75% of the participants will be from groups underrepresented in STEM and 50% will be women. Approximately half of the participants will be students who would not otherwise participate in undergraduate research, such as non-traditional students (which includes parents, married students, and older students). The REU Site also will encourage veterans and students with disabilities to apply. Participants will enhance the diversity of the future geoscience workforce; for example, 20 students from the previous REU Site have received degrees in the geosciences. Of these, 9 are in graduate school, 6 have transferred from their 2-year program to a 4-year STEM program, and 5 are working in the geosciences or a related field. The other 31 participants are still undergraduate students.The REU Site will develop a new paradigm for undergraduate research incorporating place-based and community-based participatory research. The PIs are building knowledge on increasing participation in REUs by the non-traditional students and students from groups underrepresented in STEM. The PIs have developed a proven, structured, scaffolded method of teaching science research and writing, which takes students who may have never written a technical research paper and provides them the skills and support needed to routinely deliver high quality intellectual outputs and increase their intellectual self-confidence in the process. The mentoring plan for the REU Site is focused on helping mentors to: a) prepare to mentor highly diverse teams of students; b) support mentors to deal with the expectations, issues and challenges that arise when you are mentoring teams that have a large number of nontraditional students; and c) help mentors get acculturated to conducting research on tribal lands and with Native people. The students, faculty, graduate and post-doctoral mentors, tribal professionals and other community members will be intimately engaged in CBPR, developing projects that will inherently support tribal resource management goals. Results will be disseminated to tribal authorities and community members as well as the broader scientific community. Outcomes of this REU research paradigm will concurrently establish a legacy of broader scientific capacity within reservation communities and provide pathways to scientific discoveries with a shared foundation of trust and respect.