Ecosystem research centers play a vital role in communicating science to diverse audiences. By offering experiential learning opportunities, centers can engage students, resource managers, citizen scientists, and the public in ecological understanding.
In both formal and informal science education, traditional approaches are amplified when paired with translational ecology training. Translational ecology seeks to develop actionable interventions that enhance or maintain the resilience and quality of social-ecological systems. This is done through interdisciplinary team science, scientist-practitioner partnerships, and a bottom-up approach to problem solving.
Because translational ecology reaches across communities of practice to practitioners, developing and deploying translational tools and approaches should enable us to attract a wider diversity of people to ecosystem science and its application to today's complex environmental problems
Results/Conclusions
Translational ecology builds on traditional ecological pedagogy by incorporating new approaches that teach students the value of engaging across social, professional, and disciplinary boundaries to develop and apply research programs aimed at achieving practical solutions to socio-ecological problems.
The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies has incorporated translational ecology into our programming, which spans K-to-Graduate formal education, informal education, and experiential learning for citizen scientists and practitioners. In our experience, applying a translational ecology approach can strengthen and diversify the impact of high school data jams, REU programs, science-and-management forums, and the training of graduate and postgraduate students.
In this presentation, we will review the programs we have developed, identify key differences in how we teach, and show how a focus on translational ecology can help research centers reach new communities while expanding the intellectual and social diversity of people engaged in applying ecological knowledge to socio-ecological problems.