Virtually the Same? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Remote Undergraduate Research Experiences.

In-person undergraduate research experiences (UREs) promote students' integration into careers in life science research. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic prompted institutions hosting summer URE programs to offer them remotely, raising questions about whether undergraduates who participate in remote research can experience scientific integration and whether they might perceive doing research less favorably (i.e., not beneficial or too costly). To address these questions, we examined indicators of scientific integration and perceptions of the benefits and costs of doing research among students who participated in remote life science URE programs in Summer 2020. We found that students experienced gains in scientific self-efficacy pre- to post-URE, similar to results reported for in-person UREs. We also found that students experienced gains in scientific identity, graduate and career intentions, and perceptions of the benefits of doing research only if they started their remote UREs at lower levels on these variables. Collectively, students did not change in their perceptions of the costs of doing research despite the challenges of working remotely. Yet students who started with low cost perceptions increased in these perceptions. These findings indicate that remote UREs can support students' self-efficacy development, but may otherwise be limited in their potential to promote scientific integration.

"How Do We Do This at a Distance?!" A Descriptive Study of Remote Undergraduate Research Programs during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic shut down undergraduate research programs across the United States. A group of 23 colleges, universities, and research institutes hosted remote undergraduate research programs in the life sciences during Summer 2020. Given the unprecedented offering of remote programs, we carried out a study to describe and evaluate them. Using structured templates, we documented how programs were designed and implemented, including who participated. Through focus groups and surveys, we identified programmatic strengths and shortcomings as well as recommendations for improvements from students' perspectives. Strengths included the quality of mentorship, opportunities for learning and professional development, and a feeling of connection with a larger community. Weaknesses included limited cohort building, challenges with insufficient structure, and issues with technology. Although all programs had one or more activities related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, these topics were largely absent from student reports even though programs coincided with a peak in national consciousness about racial inequities and structural racism. Our results provide evidence for designing remote Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) that are experienced favorably by students. Our results also indicate that remote REUs are sufficiently positive to further investigate their affordances and constraints, including the potential to scale up offerings, with minimal concern about disenfranchising students.

Fitness costs of butterfly oviposition on a lethal non-native plant in a mixed native and non-native plant community.

Non-native plants may be unpalatable or toxic, but have oviposition cues similar to native plants used by insects. The herbivore will then oviposit on the plant, but the offspring will be unable to develop. While such instances have been described previously, the fitness costs at the population level in the wild due to the presence of the lethal host have not been quantified, for this or other related systems. We quantified the fitness cost in the field for the native butterfly Pieris macdunnoughii in the presence of the non-native crucifer Thlaspi arvense, based on the spatial distributions of host plants, female butterflies and eggs in the habitat and the survival of the larvae in the wild. We found that 2.9% of eggs were laid on T. arvense on average, with a survival probability of 0, yielding a calculated fitness cost of 3.0% (95% confidence interval 1.7-3.6%) due to the presence of the non-native in the plant community. Survival probability to the pre-pupal stage for eggs laid on two native crucifers averaged 1.6% over 2 years. The magnitude of the fitness cost will vary temporally and spatially as a function of the relative abundance of the non-native plant. We propose that the fine-scale spatial structure of the plant community relative to the butterflies' dispersal ability, combined with the females' broad habitat use, contributes to the fitness costs associated with the non-native plant and the resulting evolutionary trap.

A trade-off between the frequency and duration of bumblebee visits to flowers.

Pollinator behavior influences plant reproduction in many ways. A traditional measure of pollination, the number of visits received, may be a poor predictor of plant reproductive success, particularly when there are trade-offs between visit quantity and components of visit quality. For example, the duration of pollinator visits may be negatively correlated with the number of visits received by a flower. We tested for a trade-off between the number of bumblebee visits and the duration of those visits in an experimental population of snapdragons (Antirrhinummajus: Scrophulariaceae). The duration of a bumblebee visit to a flower increased significantly with the time interval since the flower had last been visited. Over the lifetime of a flower the correlation between the total number and average duration of visits received by a flower was weakly negative. However, at the whole-plant level the correlation was positive: plants whose flowers received more visits also received visits of longer duration. Factors affecting the relationship between quantity and duration of pollinator visits to flowers also were investigated. Two factors weakened the negative dependence of average visit duration on number of visits received by individual snapdragon flowers: (1) the correlation between the total number of visits to a flower and the average interval between visits was only -0.53, as visits to individual flowers were not very evenly spaced over time, and (2) newly opened flowers received fewer and shorter visits than older flowers. Comparing whole plants, nectar production per flower varied dramatically across individuals, a probable explanation for the positive correlation between visit number and average duration per flower observed at the plant level. The potential for a trade-off between these two components of pollinator service exists when visit duration depends on reward quantity; whether the trade-off is realized will depend on variation in nectar production and on whether pollinators forage systematically.