For at least three decades there has been a call for training ecologists with greater quantitative skills and for scientists that are capable of working in groups to solve complex environmental problems. The Ecological Circuitry Collaboratory (ECC) is an effort to "close the circuit" between empiricists and theoreticians in the ecological sciences. The ECC consists of a set of seven investigators previously funded by the NSF Ecosystem Studies and Ecology programs, and their students, whose projects study the relationship between ecosystem structure and function. Students in the ECC are learning to build, use, and understand models while at the same time have firm grounding in the practices of field- and lab-based empirical science. Training in modeling comes from students' home institutions and from a series of group workshops. A major effort has been the development of a group modeling project to develop both modeling and group interaction skills.
The scientific merit of the project comes from the completion of seven novel and important graduate student research projects. The broader impacts will emerge as the ECC addresses critical questions about links between research, education, synthesis, prediction and group dynamics in environmental science.
