Cary Institute scientists Alan Berkowitz and Steward Pickett are working with ecology educators Gilly Puttick (Project Director) and Brian Drayton at TERC in Cambridge, MA, on an NSF-supported curriculum development project called Biocomplexity and the Habitable Planet—An Innovative Capstone Course for High School. This will be a year-long curriculum that links LTER and BioComplexity research with project-based student learning about local-to-global ecosystems.

To guide the development of the curriculum, and to learn from the experiences of teachers and students with the material, we are beginning a research effort to document student thinking about complex ecological systems.