Students are invited to apply to the REU on Sustainable Land and Water Resources, which introduces undergraduate students from 2-year and 4-year colleges and universities to the key elements of research on land and water resources that are essential to improving management practices, with a focus on Community-Based Participatory Research and diverse interdisciplinary research teams. Students are advised by a multi-institutional and multidisciplinary team of researchers associated with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (Flathead Reservation, Montana) (CSKT), the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (FDL), Salish Kootenai College (SKC), the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED), St. Anthony Falls Laboratory, University of Minnesota (UMN), and the National Lacustrine Core Facility (LacCore), Limnological Research Center, UMN. It is anticipated that additional researchers from UMN and other institutions will be recruited as new projects are defined.
Participants are involved in ongoing and new community-defined projects that integrate Earth-surface dynamics, geology, civil engineering, ecology, biology, limnology, paleolimnology, and hydrology principles and techniques required for sustainable land and water management and restoration while using an interdisciplinary team-oriented approach that merges scientific and indigenous research methodologies. Students from 2- and 4-year institutions are encouraged to discover the entire range of academic and career options from management practitioner to Ph.D.-level researcher, and how these career possibilities relate to students’ personal, academic, and career goals. In partnership with two tribal reservations, we also introduce students to land and water management challenges and career opportunities on tribal reservations. Native American students are specifically invited to apply to this REU, but the REU teams continues to be diverse in ethnicity, age, life experience, regionality, and science discipline. The REU provides a CBPR research experience in multidisciplinary environmental protection that is both engaging and challenging. Key elements that promote these outcomes are: 1) a unique mentoring approach that fosters the “whole student,” with individual attention to academic, social, cultural, personal and financial circumstances; 2) a combination of experimental, field, and computational methods; 3) close interaction with faculty who are leaders in their field on cutting-edge research projects; 4) embedding student research within active ongoing research projects at a major research institution and in CBPR on tribal reservations; and 5) the intrinsic appeal of contributing to research on subjects of obvious local and national relevance in the stunning natural settings of Montana and northern Minnesota. Each part of the REU, from orientation, to carrying out the project, to the All-Team gathering in Minneapolis at the end of the program, is carefully designed to maximize the participants’ experience.