Jornada Trails
Volume 7, Issue 1, April 2001
Contents:
Science Education for K-12 Students: The Chihuahuan Desert Nature Park
by Stephanie Bestelmeyer
Director, Chihuahuan Desert Nature Park
With a meter stick in one hand and a clipboard in the other, a Jornada Elementary School fourth grader asked, "We’re done with our transect, but can we keep collecting data?" While extending the tape measure to accommodate the request, the teachers and I marveled at another example of students’ enthusiasm for the Schoolyard LTER program. The NSF-funded program, implemented at 21 LTER sites, is designed to link LTER researchers with K-12 students and teachers.
The Jornada Basin Schoolyard LTER program is administered by the Chihuahuan Desert Nature Park, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving scientific literacy and fostering an understanding of the Chihuahuan Desert. Through the Schoolyard LTER program, students learn about vegetation, soil, weather and data collection by doing studies on long-term plots adjacent to their schools.
The students’ studies mimic research being conducted by Jornada Basin LTER scientists.
For example, Davenport Elementary School students investigate vegetation cover and composition differences in arroyos and away from arroyos using techniques developed for the LTER. Sierra Middle School students examine the effects of disturbance on vegetation and soil, following similar research conducted at Holloman Air Force Base. As students collect, analyze, and share their data with students at other schools, they gain first-hand knowledge of how science is done while also strengthening their scientific literacy and math and communication skills.
The Chihuahuan Desert Nature Park currently provides educational programs to over 7,000 K-12 students, 300 teachers, and 700 other adults each year. In addition to the Schoolyard LTER program, we also coordinate:
- Field Trips
: We bring students on field trips to the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range.
- Classroom Presentations
: We bring the desert to classrooms with presentations designed to teach about the desert while illustrating the scientific method as a way of learning about the world.
- Insect Expo
: Students learn about arthropods in fun, hands-on activity stations.
- Teacher Training Workshop
: Each summer, 5–15 science teachers learn about desert ecology and develop methods to bring more hands-on science into their classrooms.
Funding for most of these programs comes from donations from individuals, businesses and foundations. For more information, please contact us by phone (505-524-3334) or email (cdnp@zia-net.com), or visit our website at www.cdnp.org.
New Building Set for 2001 Completion
by Kris Havstad
USDA Jornada Experimental Range
The new headquarters building for the USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range and for the LTER site office on the NMSU campus is about 40 percent complete. Construction is on schedule, and the building should be completed by the end of 2001.
The building has not yet been named, but there is growing sentiment for "Wooton Hall" in honor of E. O. Wooton, the professor at New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts who was behind the creation of the Jornada Range Reserve and became its first superintendent in 1912.
The building will house 45 personnel with ARS, NMSU, and the Natural Resource Conservation Service. This staffing includes four new ARS positions, a result of new funding to the Jornada program from the U.S. Congress in fiscal year 2001. Ed Fredrickson and Al Rango have filled two of these positions, after working at the Jornada for several years. The other positions for a rangeland ecologist and a plant physiologist are currently advertised and will be filled by fall.
Book Review – Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley
by William H. Schlesinger
Duke University
Desert: The Mojave and Death Valley
Photographs by Jack Dykinga; text by Janice Emily Bowers
Abrams Press, New York, 1999. $49.50
This finely produced coffee table book records the beauty of Mojave desert wildflowers and landscapes, with an engaging narrative by one of America’s foremost desert naturalists. Describing its natural history, its mysteries, and its vulnerability to human impact, Bowers suggests that "what the entire Mojave Desert needs is a better press agent." Together with its exquisite photographs, her text fulfills that role.
Sand dunes are a highlight of this book. The main subject of Bowers’ research, the dunes come alive with her description of the plants and animals—sidewinder and kit fox—they harbor. Dykinga’s photos capture the beauty of the dunes and their wildflowers—enhanced by the heavy El Niño rains of 1997–98. My favorite photo is a landscape of birdcage evening primrose on an unnamed dune in the East Mojave.
This book is a landmark record of the beauty of America’s harshest, and unfortunately most abused, desert.
New Cross-site Project Examines Small Animal – Grass Interactions
by Brandon Bestelmeyer
USDA Jornada Experimental Range
Debra Peters and Brandon Bestelmeyer of the Jornada Experimental Range and David Lightfoot of University of New Mexico will begin work this summer on a project examining the roles of small animals, including ants, grasshoppers, rodents, and rabbits, on the growth and establishment of desert grasses, with a focus on black grama. The three-year project, funded by the NSF special competition for Cross-site Research, will be performed at the Jornada and Sevilleta LTER sites and Big Bend National Park.
Studies of vegetation dynamics at the Jornada LTER have emphasized the roles of abiotic (erosion) and anthropogenic (grazing) processes, but there is considerable evidence that biotic processes, including the impacts of native animals, also significantly affect grasslands.
These effects may be positive, such as the creation of favorable germination sites in rodent cache pits, or negative, such as granivory or seedling herbivory.
Until now, no studies have quantified these interactions in desert grasslands and compared their magnitude across different sites. The results of this work will help to explain why black grama grasslands persist or reestablish in some areas but not in others, and examine the often neglected role of animals in ecosystem functioning.
Featured LTER Investigator: William Schlesinger
by Laura Huenneke
New Mexico State University
Jornada scientists have long known Bill Schlesinger as a primary contributor to our understanding of desert biogeochemistry, author of an important text on biogeochemistry, lead investigator of the LTER group, and founding editor of Jornada Trails. Now we will have to get to know him in a new guise, as "Dean Schlesinger": Bill will begin his tenure as dean of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences in summer 2001.
Bill first came to Jornada in early July 1981. His first funded research here was the caliche project, 1983–85, in collaboration with Paul Fonteyn and Giles Marion. Walt Whitford asked him to join the LTER group in 1986, working to rewrite the proposal that funded LTER II beginning in 1988. In 1990, as Whitford considered leaving NMSU, the group asked Bill to assume leadership. That leadership resulted in the grant moving to Duke and to the successful renewal proposal for LTER III in 1994.
Bill considers the high points of his involvement with the Jornada to be the 1990 Science paper outlining the hypothesis of greater heterogeneity of soil resources with the shift to shrub dominance in desertified systems, the empirical demonstration of such a pattern in a 1996 paper in Ecology, and his recent focus on hydrology as a mechanism of redistribution of soil nutrients. He is proud of the Jornada Basin LTER’s record of constructive input to land management and natural resource policy in the southwestern U.S. and in semi-arid ecosystems generally.
We wish Bill the best of fortune in his new role as an academic leader and hope, with him, that he can continue to come to the Jornada each summer in concert with students and maintain his role as an intellectual leader in the group.
| 
