The Ecological Research as Education Network (EREN; www.erenweb.org) mission is to create and carry out high-quality, publishable research, collaborating across Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (PUIs). EREN is ideally designed to ask ecological questions that can be answered by standardizing protocols allowing students to collect data and compare it across multiple sites. In its first eight years, EREN has attracted over 300 faculty members among over 200 institutions. Using the EREN model we predict that students will learn the techniques necessary for long-term, collaborative research such as online communication, a sense of ecological variation across time and space, database management tools, as well as participation in group-based problem-solving. In addition to common research protocols, many projects are well-suited for independent student research and have shared curriculum to use in undergraduate classrooms.

This Ignite session will provide an overview of EREN, highlight some of the EREN projects’ research protocols and paired curriculum, and emphasize the successes and challenges to achieving our goals for each. Projects have ranged from investigating forest, turtle, worm, and bird populations along various gradients, to studying the factors limiting the spread of invasive species in native communities. We will discuss a multi-project assessment of student learning outcomes and include ways new EREN members can participate in the current and proposed future projects. We will end with an open panel discussion.