Here we present an ongoing long-term ecological research (LTER) project initiated in 2013 and maintained by high school students and their teacher in an urban shortgrass prairie remnant next to their school in Colorado. As an example of how to integrate authentic field experiences into life science curricula, students use pitfall traps to monitor arthropod richness, diversity, and abundance across mowed, unmowed, and edge habitats. Each year, students conduct standardized sampling and data analysis to reveal dynamic patterns in arthropod community composition, including habitat edge effects, and show significant interannual variation. The project we describe demonstrates how authentic field-based LTER can be embedded within secondary and undergraduate curricula to reinforce ecological concepts and engage students in experimental design, data management and analysis, quantitative reasoning, and hypothesis generation, while producing meaningful ecological insights. This model also offers a compelling framework for educators seeking to align student-centered inquiry with their life science courses. To date, two notable results have emerged from the LTER project: (i) a significantly greater number of individual arthropods collected from the edge habitat compared with the adjoining mowed and unmowed habitats, supporting edge effect theory, and (ii) evidence of both exponential and logistic growth in two dominant arthropod groups, millipedes and grasshoppers, respectively.
Waldman et al. (Wed,) studied this question.