Texas A&M University is awarded a grant to support the Centro de Investigaciones CientÃficas de las Huastecas "Aguazarca" (CICHAZ: www.cichaz.org) in developing a strategic plan for future improvements to infrastructure to continue to serve a diverse group of international life and social scientists as well as educational and outreach programs. Located in a region of Mexico with high biological and cultural diversity but devoid of academic and research institutions, CICHAZ has become a hub for multi-disciplinary research on social sciences, freshwater ecology, and environmental biology. The current need for CICHAZ is to develop plans for providing the infrastructure and equipment for a contemporary field station that will serve a growing group of researchers as well as outreach efforts. This planning project has two primary objectives: (1) enable CICHAZ personnel to visit established, productive field stations including NSF FSML supported stations and work with their leaders to learn best practices for stations with research and education missions and (2) to hold workshops that will bring together stakeholders from both sides of the US-Mexico border, both education and research backgrounds, and both life science and social science perspectives at CICHAZ in order to develop a strategic plan. Ultimately, the practices learned from visiting other stations together with the workshops will culminate in a 5-year plan and additional long-term objects with landmarks for achieving those objectives.
As an international research station with a strong outreach mission and particular focus on research and educational relationships between the U.S. and Mexico, the broader impacts of the longer-term initiatives of the field station include research experiences for US and Mexican undergraduates and a mentoring program for local junior and high school students. This planning effort will specifically include activities to develop strategy that will help to achieve these goals.
