Supporting Data-driven Field Studies at a Desert Studies Center

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Educational Instrumentation project at the California State University (CSU) Desert Studies Center, which is housed at CSU Fullerton and governed by CSU Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Northridge, Pomona, and San Bernardino, will strengthen undergraduate learning in the biological and earth sciences. Specifically, this project will secure a research-grade weather station, which will allow students to collect and analyze real-time environmental data. Over 800 students will utilize the project-funded equipment each year, amongst the thousands of students that visit the center four course field trips or independent field work. The weather station will also be used by student and faculty researchers, and will be connected to the NSF-funded Dendra network of over 200 monitoring sites across the southwestern U.S. The goals of this project are to enrich the learning and experiences of undergraduate students by providing critical equipment for students across the biological, environmental, and earth sciences. The weather station will record rainfall, air temperature, relative humidity, atmospheric pressure, solar radiation flux density, wind speed, wind direction, CO2, soil temperature, soil moisture, and soil conductivity data that will be stored in the cloud for use in courses and research projects. After initial installation, the project will obtain and install additional sensors and instruments to expand the uses of the station in alignment with user needs. The project will assess the impact of the project funded equipment using detailed user info collected from existing data systems and CSU dashboards, along with outcomes and activity summaries from impacted courses. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and increase capacity to engage in the development and implementation of innovations to improve STEM teaching and learning at HSIs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.