REU Site: Global Change Ecology at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

This REU Site award to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), located in Edgewater, MD, will support the training of 10 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2023-2025. It is anticipated that a total of 30 students, primarily from schools with limited research opportunities, or from an under-represented group, will be trained in the program.

The SERC REU program focuses on how aspects of global change, including ecosystem conservation, climate change, and altered biodiversity, are changing ecosystem functions. During their internships, students will participate in field research, laboratory work, data analysis, and professional development, including sessions related to coding in R, scientific communication, and STEM careers.

Interns will practice communicating with a variety of audiences, producing both a formal presentation for a scientific audience and a short video for lay audiences that describes the results and implications for their independent research projects. They also work with their mentors to find ways that their research informs, and is informed by, other disciplines to better understand the impacts of their work beyond the research sphere.

Students will learn how research is conducted, and many will present the results of their work at scientific conferences. Assessment of the program will be done through the online SALG URSSA tool. Students will be required to register in the NSF ETAP system (etap.nsf.gov) and tracked after the program to determine their career paths.

In recent centuries, humans have dramatically altered the planet through habitat fragmentation, increased greenhouse gases, species introductions, excess nutrient loading, and native species extirpation. Determining and ultimately mitigating the consequences of these global transformations is a major goal in ecology and the primary focus of the REU program at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

The environmental issues of the 21st century are complex and require a multi-disciplinary approach. Our students are trained in many subfields including ecology, biogeochemistry, genetics, quantitative ecology, and science communication, resulting in rich experiences and scientific impacts. SERC researchers and interns collaborate with experts across the Smithsonian, as well as in communities and partner organizations, to conduct work that combines natural and social science research, community and stakeholder engagement, and education as part of the Smithsonian’s pan-institutional Working Land and Seascapes, Interconnected Health, and Urbanized Estuaries initiatives.

This allows REU interns to expand their networks beyond SERC and engage a variety of voices and range of expertise that they can use to develop and implement their independent projects. In recent years, SERC REU intern projects have included studies on drivers of change in summer flounder populations in Chesapeake Bay, the impacts of rhizobia strain diversity on the productivity and herbivore resistance of soybean plants under different climate change scenarios, relationships among vegetation, salinity, and methane emissions from tidal saltmarshes, and estimations of carbon sequestration from seagrass beds in Belize using remote sensing.

Since 2001, SERC’s REU interns have conducted novel research resulting in 77 presentations at national and international meetings and 44 peer-reviewed articles. More information about the program is available by visiting https://serc.si.edu/internships, or by contacting the PI (Dr. Alison Cawood at [email protected]) or the co-PI (Dr. John Parker at [email protected]).

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.