Bell Museum

October 22, 2022

By Emily Dzieweczynski, Communications Associate at the Bell Museum

This summer, middle school teacher Lauren Reuss traded her classroom for the field, shadowing MSP LTER researchers to develop hands-on urban ecology lessons for students across the Twin Cities. Inspired by squirrel behavior research, she's designing a series of lessons focused on squirrel behavior and adaptation to the urban environment. Read this piece from the Bell Museum's Emily Dzieweczynski to discover how this Bell Museum collaboration is helping kids see science in the world right outside their door.

July 29, 2026

By Mary Marek-Spartz, MSP LTER Information Manager & GIS Analyst

The "Plot A Pollinator" activity at the Bell Museum's 2026 Solution Studio makerspace introduces kids to GIS using real bumble bee distribution data. Designed for lower elementary students, the activity teaches foundational map-reading skills like reading coordinate planes, legends, and heat maps, while sneaking in more complex geospatial concepts like hexagonal tiling and map distortion. It's a hands-on entry point into spatial thinking, built around a question every good scientist asks: what patterns can we find in the world around us?

December 21, 2023

By Meghan Klasic, Postdoctoral Researcher in the University of Minnesota Department of Forest Resources, and the MSP LTER Governance Team

What makes someone rethink their lawn? With help from the MSP LTER Bee Lawn/Pollinators team, Meghan Klasic and other social scientists in the Governance Team surveyed residents open to "pollinator-friendly" lawn management—digging into how they care for their lawns, what they think about pollinators, and how local norms shape their choices.