Undergraduate Field and Remote Research Education in STEM

Knowledge Graph (71 nodes, 1003 connections)

Research Primer

Background

Undergraduate research education in the sciences has long depended on hands-on experiences that take students out of lecture halls and into the places where data are actually collected. At field stations like the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Gothic, Colorado, undergraduates work alongside scientists on real research problems — measuring snowmelt timing, surveying wildflowers, sampling streams, or mapping geologic formations across the Gunnison Basin. These undergraduate field experiences can range from short field laboratories embedded in courses to multi-week summer research internships, and they often shape whether a student continues in a science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) career. Keeping students moving forward in these fields, sometimes called STEM retention, is a central concern for educators because attrition is high, especially among students from groups historically underrepresented in science.

Why does this matter for mountain ecosystems and the Gunnison Basin specifically? Long-term ecological and geological research in places like RMBL depends on a steady pipeline of trained scientists who understand both the natural history of these landscapes and the technical tools used to study them. Increasingly, that toolkit includes computational skills — the ability to manage large datasets, write code, run statistical analyses, and work with remote sensing or sensor-network data. A student studying pollinators on a Gothic hillside today is also likely to be cleaning spreadsheets, running R scripts, or interpreting satellite imagery. Field experiences that combine ecological observation with computational training are therefore especially valuable.

A reader approaching this body of work should keep three ideas in mind. First, field experiences are not just about content delivery; they build identity, confidence, and community among emerging scientists. Second, computational and quantitative skills are now woven into nearly every field discipline, from stream ecology to thermochronology. Third, when in-person field work becomes impossible — as during the COVID-19 pandemic — the question of whether remote alternatives can deliver the same benefits for STEM retention becomes urgent and practical.

Foundational work

Much of the foundational research relevant to undergraduate training in the Gunnison Basin came not from education studies but from the field projects in which students participated. Early 2000s work on the geologic evolution of western Colorado — including river incision histories of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Unaweep Canyon (Aslan et al., 2008) and Quaternary incision rates calibrated by the Lava Creek B ash (Darling et al., 2009) — established the kinds of multi-investigator, multi-method field projects that have long served as training grounds for student researchers. Parallel ecological field studies, such as work on plant–herbivore interactions in Heracleum sphondylium (Haamen et al., 2003) and on light limitation of benthic algae in Copper Creek (Greenberg, 2008), illustrated the small-scale, hypothesis-driven experiments that undergraduates could realistically design and complete during a summer at a field station.

These earlier studies set important precedents: they showed that meaningful science could emerge from short, place-based field projects, and they provided the templates of mentorship, experimental design, and data analysis that continue to structure undergraduate research today.

Key findings

A consistent finding across the field-based studies in this area is that careful, small-scale experiments yield robust results when grounded in good site knowledge. In stream ecology work in the Gunnison Basin, light availability and grazer presence had strong, measurable effects on algal biomass, with shaded channels supporting higher chlorophyll concentrations than open channels when only one or two grazer species were present (Greenberg, 2008). The same study documented that shaded sites in Copper Creek received photosynthetically active radiation above the threshold for active growth for only about two hours per day, indicating clear light limitation — a tractable result for an undergraduate-scale project. In plant ecology, simulated herbivory experiments showed that clipping reduced subsequent Hemiptera herbivore loads and tended to reduce leaf damage on Heracleum sphondylium, even though leaf trichome density and new leaf length did not change (Haamen et al., 2003). Together these findings demonstrate that field experiments designed at scales appropriate for students can still produce strong, publishable inferences about ecosystem processes.

On the geosciences side, multi-author field campaigns have produced detailed histories of how the rivers and plateaus of western Colorado came to look the way they do, including evidence that abandonment of Unaweep Canyon involved both headward erosion and lake spillover (Hood et al., 2014) and that the Uncompahgre Plateau experienced complex Late Cretaceous to Oligocene heating, cooling, and reheating histories (Rønnevik et al., 2017). More recent magnetic-fabric work in the same uplift has revealed that post-depositional fluid flow, rather than tectonic deformation, generated the unusual oblique fabrics in Jurassic sandstones (Ejembi et al., 2020). These projects exemplify the kind of integrative field-and-lab science in which undergraduates often play meaningful roles.

When the COVID-19 pandemic forced summer 2020 research programs across 23 institutions to move online, a large multi-institution study found that students nonetheless reported strong mentorship, professional development gains, and a sense of community, while also experiencing weaknesses around cohort building, structure, and technology (Erickson et al., 2022). A companion analysis showed that remote students experienced gains in scientific self-efficacy comparable to in-person programs, but gains in scientific identity, career intentions, and perceived benefits of research occurred mainly for students who started at lower levels — suggesting remote formats can support some, but not all, dimensions of scientific integration (Hess et al., 2023).

Current frontier

Early work in the 2000s in the Gunnison Basin established place-based, hypothesis-driven field projects as a backbone of undergraduate training. Recent studies since 2020 have shifted focus dramatically toward evaluating whether the benefits of these in-person experiences can be replicated when students cannot travel to field sites. The large multi-institution evaluations of 2020 remote programs (Erickson et al., 2022; Hess et al., 2023) (Hess et al., 2023) represent the current frontier: rather than asking what students learn about a particular ecosystem, they ask whether remote mentoring, virtual datasets, and online cohorts can build scientific identity and keep students in STEM. New methods being deployed include structured templates for documenting program design, focus groups, and pre/post surveys of self-efficacy and career intent.

The trajectory points toward hybrid models that combine the irreplaceable elements of fieldwork — being on the landscape, handling specimens, talking with mentors over coffee — with the computational and remote-collaboration skills students increasingly need. Questions about diversity, equity, and inclusion, which the 2020 evaluations found were addressed unevenly across programs (Erickson et al., 2022), are also moving from the margins to the center of program design.

Open questions

Several important questions remain open for the next decade. Which specific elements of in-person field experience are essential for building scientific identity and STEM retention, and which can be effectively delivered remotely or in hybrid formats? How can field stations like RMBL design programs that intentionally develop computational fluency alongside natural history skills, without crowding out time on the landscape? How can remote and hybrid programs better support students who begin with lower confidence — the very students for whom gains were largest in 2020 (Hess et al., 2023) — and how should diversity, equity, and inclusion programming be structured so it is integral rather than peripheral? Finally, can long-term tracking of alumni from Gunnison Basin programs reveal which experiences most strongly predict careers in environmental science and stewardship of mountain ecosystems?

References

Aslan, A., et al. (2008). River incision histories of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison and Unaweep Canyon: Interplay between late Cenozoic tectonism, climate change, and drainage integration in the western Rocky Mountains. Geological Society of America eBooks. →

Darling, A. L., et al. (2009). Quaternary incision rates and drainage evolution of the Uncompahgre and Gunnison Rivers, western Colorado, as calibrated by the Lava Creek B ash. Rocky Mountain Geology. →

Ejembi, J., et al. (2020). Post-Depositional Fluid Flow in Jurassic Sandstones of the Uncompahgre Uplift: Insights From Magnetic Fabrics. Frontiers in Earth Science. →

Erickson, O. A., et al. (2022). "How Do We Do This at a Distance?!" A Descriptive Study of Remote Undergraduate Research Programs during COVID-19. CBE Life Sciences Education. →

Greenberg, J. (2008). Impact of light availability on benthic algal assemblages and invertebrate species composition. →

Haamen, et al. (2003). The response of Heracleum sphondylium (Apiaceae) and its herbivores to simulated herbivory and nutrient augmentation. URBEE. →

Hess, R. A., et al. (2023). Virtually the Same? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Remote Undergraduate Research Experiences. Life Sciences Education. →

Hood, W. C., et al. (2014). Aftermath of a stream capture: Cactus Park lake spillover and the origin of East Creek, Uncompahgre Plateau, western Colorado. Geosphere. →

Rønnevik, C., et al. (2017). Thermal evolution and exhumation history of the Uncompahgre Plateau (northeastern Colorado Plateau), based on apatite fission track and (U-Th)-He thermochronology and zircon U-Pb dating. Geosphere. →

Concept (3) →

Author (47) →

Publication (9) →