Dear Students:
We are looking for students who would like to take an active interest in conserving and restoring native habitats. At Fermilab we have a project restoring the tallgrass prairie that last flourished in Abraham Lincoln's youth. Our restoration project takes the efforts of local experts and area volunteers, including many students and their teachers, and covers hundreds of acres.
As part of our work we are interested in a student research study on plant populations in native and restored prairies. If you agree to conduct quadrat studies, counting the number and kind of plants in a square meter, at a nearby prairie site, we will serve your data on the World Wide Web as part of this study. You can compare your data with data contributed by other groups to answer interesting research questions about the prairie.
Our Website has resources to help with your research. Check out the links below. As part of your study, you might also want to look at Fermilab data on birds and insects. Also, some of our students collect abiotic data--soil temperature and moisture, air temperature and humidity, and wind and light conditions--when they do collect the quadrat data. It is also interesting to learn what the prairie meant to the Native Americans and the settlers. And we maintain a bison herd. We have provided resource links to some Websites that contain information on these interesting topics.
We need your help!
Sincerely,
Robert Lootens
Chairman, Fermilab Ecological Land Management Committee
