On Thursday, January 28, SURVIVORS project team members met on-site with middle-school students at the Collège d’Einville au Jars.

SURVIVORS, a participatory research project :

Two years ago, 80 middle-school students at the collège d’Einville au Jars began their “Survivors” adventure : an original participatory research project was launched by a team of INRA researchers (the Joint Research Unit for Forest Ecology and Ecophysiology – UMR EEF) with support from LabEx ARBRE and the Nancy-Champenoux Center for Environmental Initiatives (CPIE). Accompanied by their teachers and researchers, these students actively participated in an experiment conducted in a Champenoux nursery aimed at understanding how young beech trees survive when faced with significant changes in their water-carbon-nitrogen functioning. To do this, each student became a sponsor for their own beech tree which they carefully defoliated (up to 75%) by following precise experimentation protocol.

Prior to their visit in January, the researchers provided the students, currently in their 3rd class, growth data of the beech trees that they had each sponsored. Each student had calculated the growth in diameter and height, the surface and the number of leaves on their trees which had been subjected to defoliation. Each of the three classes built models of allometric relationships with all of the sponsored trees. In class this last Thursday the project team tested the college students on their appropriation of the scientific approach. The researchers then presented other sets of results and discussed them with the students drawing specific attention to related mathematical concepts. The students completed a questionnaire in their research notebooks and will continue their analysis with their life Sciences teachers. The next meeting between these budding scientists and project researchers is set to take place in Champenoux, late May 2016.