Amanda E. Sorensen

Since its introduction in 2018, the Four‐Dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) Framework has advanced ecology education. Yet, ecology educators have had different understandings of aspects of the Framework. Here, we describe the updates to the original Framework that aim to provide more clarity. Specifically, we describe higher‐level changes in how the Framework is presented on the 4DEE website, changes to some of the elements within the dimensions, mostly in the Human–Environment Interactions dimension, and perhaps most substantively, replacing the lists of subelements with more descriptive paragraphs that explain the intent of the elements. We hope that these updates will promote the advancement of ecology education such that students are learning about the full range of knowledge and practices in contemporary ecology.

Education has been and remains an important focus within the Ecological Society of America (ESA). Since the late 1980s, the number of initiatives, sections, and committees devoted to education, especially at the undergraduate level, has increased greatly. The purpose of this article is to identify and describe the education‐related initiatives and groups within ESA (as of May 2025), especially to provide information for new members. Education activities within ESA are coordinated by the Office for Education and Diversity Programs (OEDP). The Education Committee, which reports to ESA’s Governing Board, engages in various education‐related activities on behalf of the Board. Three sections within the ESA address education: the Education Section, the Researchers at Undergraduate Institutions, and the Communication and Engagement Section. ESA’s Four‐Dimensional Ecology Education (4DEE) framework was endorsed by the Society’s Governing Board in 2018 and is overseen by a 4DEE Sub‐Committee. Three working groups currently help to implement aspects of 4DEE, including nonmajors and general education, video and media, and integration. The ESA sponsors various online resources to support education, including the EcoEdDL digital library, the EcoEd email listserv, and the Teaching with Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) online journal. Education has become an integral part of the ESA’s Annual Meeting, where attendees can find numerous oral presentations, poster sessions and workshops, including the popular Resources for Ecology Education Fair and Share (REEFS). The Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability (SEEDS) initiative is ESA’s flagship outreach program. The OEDP sponsors a Life Discovery‐Doing Science Education Conference (LDC) that meets annually or semi‐annually. Each year, the ESA formally recognizes an outstanding ecology educator through its Eugene P. Odum Award for Excellence in Ecology Education. ESA members wishing to become involved in ESA’s education initiatives should visit http://www.esa.org/education for more information.

Introduction: There has been little work investigating the effect of framing in citizen science and the subsequent effects on data quality and participant outcomes (e.g., science literacy, trust in science, motivations to contribute).Methods: To establish the impact of framing in citizen science on data quality and participant outcomes, an experimental web-based citizen science program was created where participants were engaged in tree phenology research. Participants were randomized to one of two differently framed conditions where they were engaged in the same exact data collection task, but the rhetoric around participant contribution was framed differently. In this, participants were either referred to as a “Citizen Scientist” or “Volunteer.” Participants took a pre and post survey that measured science literacy, trust in science, and motivations to contribute to citizen science.Results: There were significant differences in participant outcomes and data quality between the two conditions post-participation. Individuals in the “Citizen Scientist” condition completed the project and submitted higher quality data significantly more than those individuals in the “Volunteer” condition. Additionally, individuals in the two conditions begin to diverge in their responses to questions within each of the measured areas post-participation.Discussion: This research suggests that being called a citizen scientist may elicit internally held expectations of contribution, informed by normative and culturally informed experiences. Therefore, participants might view their contributions as citizen scientists are more consequential than when as volunteers. Research of this nature can help guide practitioners using citizen science in thinking about framing as a part of their project development and stimulate further research on best practices in citizen science project design.

Course‐based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are an instructional strategy to help students learn the content and process of science by engaging students in authentic science research. The ESA‐endorsed 4‐Dimensional Ecology Education framework emphasizes engaging students in authentic ecology scientific practices, and uniquely foregrounds human dimensions as a core tenant of ecological literacy. Model‐based CURE instruction may help ecology instructors by giving students a scaffold to better orient their line of inquiry and develop more accurate conceptions of the broader socio‐ecological system through the integration of the CURE experimental data to known concepts within the system. We explored how student model accuracy changes throughout the course, what modeling practices students engaged in during collaborative modeling, and how students used CURE data along with social and ecological sciences in their models. We found that students created more accurate models as the course progressed, and all student groups exhibited expert‐like modeling practices during the summative collaborative modeling process. Importantly, we also found that students were able to integrate experimental data they generated through the CURE within their broader understanding of the study system. A major benefit of model‐based CUREs is to cultivate scientific thinking by helping students connect how individual pieces of research inform larger phenomenon.

Climate change education is of great interest to many in higher education. What is missing, however, is a sense of how students view climate change especially with respect to specific impacts such as changes to food systems. We designed a survey, which focused on climate change, food systems, and GMOs. We administered this survey in a large introductory undergraduate environmental science class and compared responses to demographic information. We found that students were knowledgeable in some areas more than others; especially when considering climate change drivers and mitigating factors. We also found that students were largely concerned about climate change impacts and wanted to understand the socio-environmental solutions that might help to mitigate potential impact. These same students, however, seemed optimistic that solutions could be found and implemented. Finally, while little demographic trends emerged, students who were more knowledgeable in one area (e.g., GMOS) tended to be knowledgeable in other areas.

Stakeholder engagement and participation is often an essential ingredient for successful environmental conservation and management. Including stakeholders in participatory environmental research has been an increasingly recognized necessity for understanding the complex nature of social–ecological systems (SES). The public is also essential to help structure environmental problems and decide on management interventions. As a result, new inclusive approaches to scientific research have emerged, such as Citizen Science. While there have been many climate change-related citizen science projects, in this paper, we provide an overview of a specific type of citizen science project. More specifically, we describe a participatory modeling approach to citizen science which can support climate change research.

Interest in citizen science is growing among both scientists and community groups who are interested in creating natural resource management projects. Such projects have the potential to result in social learning, which can further reinforce resource stewardship. Data to study this learning process, however, remain scant. Using transcripts from four different natural resource management projects, we use discourse analysis to investigate the discursive practice between project scientists and community members in the development of models that were used to test ideas and subsequently modified with citizen collected data. We found that only a portion of the discussion focused on knowledge building and that only experts provided challenges to ideas being discussed. Subsequently to these challenges, however, a greater proportion of knowledge co-creation occurred.

Forests provide valuable ecosystem services to individuals that live near them and visit them. However, many forests, especially in highly developed areas, are specifically managed for resource conservation purposes. A common practice for conservation is restricting access to people to ensure minimal human-driven harm. While the restriction of human access to a forest increases its biological ecosystem services, it limits its cultural services and may reduce the public’s perceived value of the forest. To investigate how access influences the perceived value of a forest, two forests in the state of New Jersey, USA, were compared. The forests, the Rutgers Ecological Preserve (RUEP) and Hutcheson Memorial Forest (HMF), represent accessible and inaccessible forests respectively. The study reported here evaluated the effects of visitation and accessibility on public perception of both sites. Residents near the RUEP and HMF, and visitors of both sites, were surveyed (n = 48). The results of the surveys demonstrated that the frequency of visitation and community location can have noticeable influences on a number of variables, including one’s belief that forests provide important services and the thought that protected areas take away from an individual’s freedom to use the area. A more positive view of the forests was present in those who visited the public forest most often.