Luquillo Schoolyard LTER

The Luquillo Schoolyard LTER program has adopted a pipeline model to guide the development and implementation of outreach activities from K12 to graduate education. At each level students are provided with authentic LTER experiences and encouraged to continue in the field of ecology research. At the middle school level, LUQ provides the Journey to El Yunque program as a free, bilingual, web-based curriculum in ecology. It uses the context of the LUQ research on hurricane disturbance to teach students about basic concepts in ecology. At the high school level, LUQ supports four high schools in rural Puerto Rico to conduct long-term research in their local environments. Teachers and students from each high school participate in an annual cycle of designing research, training at LUQ in field methods, data collection, and presentation at a joint symposium on the campus of the University of Puerto Rico. At the undergraduate level, LUQ provides the undergraduate mentoring in environmental biology program for freshman and sophomores and the REU program for juniors and seniors.