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Kansas science teachers visit KU Field Station this week
LAWRENCE — This week, 16 middle school science teachers from Kansas have converged at the KU Field Station. They are spending three days together working with University of Kansas scientists to explore resources and gain new ideas to take into their classrooms. The teachers — the final group to benefit from a five-year program, the Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute — work at schools located in Butler, Douglas, Johnson, Miami and Shawnee counties.
New push will digitize records of African plants held in herbaria and museums across the US
LAWRENCE — With a group of related grants from the National Science Foundation, researchers are systemically digitizing more than a million specimens of plants from across tropical Africa held at 20 institutions throughout the United States. The tropical African plant specimens — documenting some of the richest elements of biodiversity in the world — will be digitally imaged, while associated data are captured and data records are georeferenced. Some of the job of assembling and performing quality control on the related datasets is taking place at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Kirsten Bosnak, KU Field Station, 785-864-6267, [email protected], @KUFieldStation
Kansas science teachers visit KU Field Station this week
LAWRENCE — This week, 16 middle school science teachers from Kansas have converged at the KU Field Station, just north of Lawrence. They are spending three days together working with University of Kansas scientists to explore resources and gain new ideas to take into their classrooms.
The teachers — the final group to benefit from a five-year program, the Ecosystems of Kansas Summer Institute — serve in school districts representing a diversity of students, both urban and rural.
During their time together, teachers can choose among many activities, including tours of various collections at the KU Natural History Museum; a field trip searching for reptiles and amphibians; participating in labs to investigate soil respiration, plants and microbiomes; and learning about the development of the interactive website Mapping Kansas Ecosystems. One afternoon will focus on the intersection of art and science. One session, for example, will focus on the use of quadrants to help students make high-quality drawings.
“I’m looking forward to meeting other middle school educators and university researchers to collaborate and learn about key life science practices,” said participant Mallory Beem, a teacher at California Trail Middle School, Olathe. “Having access to current research regarding the ecosystems of Kansas will allow me to provide relevant and timely content to my students next year.”
The summer institute, funded by a National Science Foundation grant-within-a-grant, is overseen by Peggy Schultz, researcher at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research and a faculty member in KU’s Environmental Studies Program. Schultz modeled the program on one she created in her previous position as a faculty member at Indiana University; that program is ongoing.
“We want to give teachers information and methods they can use, but we also want to show them how important we believe it is to invest in them,” Schultz said.
Participants in the program are selected through an application process, with information available at the institute’s KU website.
The four previous years, KU has hosted a five-day program for high school teachers from across the state. The teachers worked with KU scientists to learn about current research and methods that link to K-12 science standards.
They spent mornings outdoors at various field sites, including the KU Field Station’s Rockefeller Native Prairie, a nearby stream and the Free State Prairie site at Lawrence Free State High School. Morning field studies focused on three areas: aquatic invertebrate ecology, terrestrial ecology, and the interactions of plants and the organisms that live within them. In the afternoons, the groups worked at the Field Station’s Armitage Education Center, developing inquiry-based curriculum for their classrooms. The program also included a GIS component.
During this final year of the Summer Institute, Schultz and her team wanted to offer resources to middle school teachers.
The Summer Institute began in 2018 and was on hold in 2020 because of COVID-19 restrictions. The NSF allowed an additional year for the program to be completed. During the five years of the institute, 55 teachers have participated. Some have continued to work with KU researchers through ongoing teaching or research collaborations.
Teachers participating in the 2023 Summer Institute:
1. Aline Honey, West Middle School, Lawrence
2. Brenda Hahn, French Middle School, Topeka
3. Christopher Hines, Woodland Spring Middle School, Olathe
4. Connie Merz, Billy Mills Middle School, Lawrence
5. Cory Lewis, Summit Trail Middle School, Olathe
6. Darla Belt, Aubry Bend Middle School, Overland Park
7. Eric Conner III, French Middle School, Topeka
8. Jessica Sadler, Oregon Trail Middle School, Olathe
9. Jordan Blackman, Oxford Middle School, Overland Park
10. Kelsey Potter, Andover Central Middle School, Andover
11. Mallory Beem, California Trail Middle School, Olathe
12. Nicole Bishop, Oregon Trail Middle School, Olathe
13. Rene Gloshen, Pioneer Trail Middle School, Olathe
14. Ruth Frye, Summit Trail Middle School, Olathe
15. Tamara Brinckman, Landon Middle School, Topeka
16. Lacie Beth Weishaar, Spring Hill Middle School, Spring Hill.
Participating researchers and staff, in addition to Schultz:
1. Amanda Gehin, KU graduate student in ecology & evolutionary biology
2. Wendy Holman, education program coordinator for the KU Field Station
3. Terra Lubin, researcher in the Bever/Schultz Lab at KU
4. Jennifer Moody, botanist, Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research
5. Dana Peterson, assistant research professor, Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research
6. Laura Podzikowski, postdoctoral researcher in the Bever/Schultz Lab
7. Ben Reed, assistant professor of biology, Washburn University.
The Summer Institute is part of an NSF EPSCoR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) project funded through a $20 million grant announced in 2017. The NSF project, “Microbiomes of Aquatic, Plant, and Soil Systems across Kansas (MAPS),” RII Track-1 Award OIA-1656006, is a collaboration among five Kansas universities. Matching support comes from the state of Kansas through the Kansas Board of Regents.
The MAPS project’s principal investigator is Kristin Bowman-James, KU Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. Four other professors lead and supervise specific parts of the research: Jim Bever, senior scientist at the Biological Survey and Foundation Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology; Sharon Billings, senior scientist at the Biological Survey and Dean’s Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; and K-State professors Chuck Rice and Walter Dodds.
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
New push will digitize records of African plants held in herbaria and museums across the US
LAWRENCE — Over the past few decades, herbaria and museums worldwide have created digital data records documenting millions of specimens in their holdings. The benefits of digitizing the contents of natural history museums and research institutions flow to the public and researchers worldwide.
Now, through a group of related grants from the National Science Foundation, researchers are systemically digitizing more than a million specimens of plants from across tropical Africa held at 20 institutions throughout the United States. The tropical African plant specimens — documenting some of the richest elements of biodiversity in the world — will be digitally imaged, while associated data are captured and data records are georeferenced.
Some of the job of assembling and performing quality control on the related datasets is taking place at the University of Kansas Biodiversity Institute, with $1 million of National Science Foundation funds supporting data cleaning and improvement work led by Town Peterson, University Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and senior curator with the KU Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute. Peterson also directs the overall projects, which includes the U.S. herbaria and four African partner institutions.
“Herbaria tend to have large-scale collections, so this is a big initiative,” Peterson said. “The herbarium community in the U.S. has made really good progress on U.S. data thanks to some big initiatives at NSF, so now you can access a lot of the herbarium data on U.S. plants online easily. Still, there’s a lot of herbarium specimens from other parts of the world that nobody’s gotten to yet. Tropical Africa is one of those places.”
Building on previous digitization collaborations with Alex Asase, professor at the University of Ghana, Peterson was involved in assembling the network of American herbaria to apply for the new NSF funds. Previously, Peterson and Asase partnered to organize digitization of more than 250,000 herbarium records for specimens from West Africa in work funded by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. This new grant aims to move much of the specimen digitization enterprise to a new model, in which the people wanting and needing to use the data are major factors in capturing, improving and sharing the data.
“Alex is in charge of one of the larger herbaria in in West Africa,” Peterson said. “So, he digitized those data and got them online for the scientific community. Alex’s work has helped other herbaria in Benin, Togo, Liberia, Nigeria and Cameroon. But the biggest collections are held in herbaria and museums in Europe… you can’t really have any control over collections priorities in those institutions. So how do you speed that up? Alex asked, ‘What if we were to find a solution where the people who need the data promote and essentially make the capture of the data happen?’”
The new NSF-funded project is larger in scope, involving essentially all U.S. institutions with important holdings from the region. Among the partners are the University of California-Berkeley, California Botanic Garden (formerly Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden), Missouri Botanical Garden, Harvard University and the New York Botanical Garden.
“The idea is that NSF funds U.S. herbaria to scan and capture data from all of their plant specimens from tropical Africa,” Peterson said. “The data are then improved via data-quality checking here at the University of Kansas and georeferenced by African partner teams located in Ghana, Rwanda, Malawi and Gabon. That is, a major part of the process of making these data come alive will be done by African scientists and students who are eager to access such a rich store of information.”
Peterson, an ornithologist by training, also is a leader in working with data generated by digitization projects. The KU Biodiversity Institute was an early pioneer in the field. In this capacity, his team at KU (including KU graduate students) will work with the huge datasets that the herbaria and African georeferencing teams will generate.
“The data come back here to KU, and my group will do a lot of the quality control,” Peterson said. “We’ll pick out possible problems. Then this big data pool — about 1.3 million new data records for tropical Africa — will be at the disposition of not just the network of herbaria, but the whole world community. The data will be there for scientific analyses to be done.”
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