Collaborative Research: Sustainable Land and Water Resources - A Community Based Participatory Research Experience for Undergraduates

This REU Site is a tribally-focused, community-based team project focused on training students in the implementation of Sustainable Land and Water Resources. Its goal is 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. Each year, students divided into three teams to conduct research that integrates Earth-surface dynamics, geology, hydrology and other disciplines. Research teams are 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 incorporates an interdisciplinary team-oriented approach that emphasizes quantitative and predictive methods, CBPR, indigenous research methods, and traditional ecological knowledge. The REU Site encourages participation by underrepresented students and students who are unsure about how they fit into the world of science to pursue STEM careers.

The REU Site is developing a new paradigm for undergraduate research that will increase participation of all students, particularly URMs in the geosciences via a transformative process that places the communities where research is being conducted and the participants themselves at the core of the program design. The REU is designed to be transformative not only to student participants, but to the institutions themselves, by increasing interaction between tribal communities, tribal colleges, and mainstream research institutions. The program design starts from the position that diversity in the geosciences can only happen when the system itself is fundamentally changed, adopting a partnership rather than a domination model. Every aspect of the REU is considered from the perspective of increasing institutional capacity for inclusive excellence. The PIs are building knowledge on increasing participation in REUs by the non-traditional student and students from groups underrepresented in STEM. The PIs are building knowledge on increasing participation in REUs by non-traditional students and students from groups underrepresented in STEM. The researchers 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 with 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 are intimately engaged in CBPR, developing projects that inherently support tribal resource management goals. Results are 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.

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.