Lassen Field Station Planning

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This award will support strategic planning for the new Lassen Field Station (LFS), a partnership between the Lassen Volcanic National Park and the University of California, Davis, and the newest member of the University of California Natural Reserve System. LFS has potential for impact beyond that typical of many biological field stations. Much of the research enabled by LFS addresses a pressing research need in the western United States: forest management and wildfire, in a region of California that has been repeatedly decimated by wildfires in recent years. LFS also has unparalleled potential as a site for research on volcanism, volcanic landscapes and their associated species and ecosystems. The Park receives more than 500,000 visitors per year. An explicit goal of the planning process is to identify means by which both curriculum content and knowledge generated by researchers can be disseminated to this receptive public, either through direct researcher-to-public interactions, or interactions mediated through researcher contact with Park staff and volunteers. The northeast corner of California is a largely rural area with few economic engines; public and charter schools in the area already embed some Park-based science into their curricula. The planning process will identify ways that researchers and instructors from the LFS partnership can enrich local communities with experiential learning for their K-12 students. Funds will be used to convene a series of planning meetings to 1) create a five to ten-year strategic vision for the field station, 2) identify and prioritize research facility needs, and 3) identify, prioritize and engage other agency and NGO partners for the field station. A strategic planning effort, encompassing the next five to ten years, will establish goals and articulate constraints to focus the efforts of both Park and UC Davis Natural Reserves staff as research and teaching increase at LFS. For more information about Lassen Field station visit https://naturalreserves.ucdavis.edu/lassen-volcanic-national-park-partnership.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.