The Area: The Walnut Creek Center for Education and Research (WCCER) is located at the confluence of Apache and Walnut creeks, in the Verde River watershed. It is located on USFS land, which is leased by the WCCER. The center is the only fully protected riparian area in the region. Lush meadows are intermixed with various trees, including walnut, Arizona Sycamore, Cottonwood, Ash, Boxelder, Willows, and New Mexico Locust. Adjacent to center lands are great examples of pinyon-juniper-oak woodlands and manzanita-shrub oak dominated chaparral, while old-growth ponderosa pine stands are just a few minutes drive away.

The Partnership: The Walnut Creek Center for Education and Research is a unique partnership of Northern Arizona educational institutions offering innovative field-based experiences in environmental education, appreciation and research. The partnership develops, maintains, and operates a multi-disciplinary field station and campus for education and research in the Central Arizona Highlands, and creates and delivers innovative, collaborative educational programs for colleges, universities, museums, and non-profit organizations.

Northern Arizona University is currently pursuing a strong cooperative relationship with Yavapai College that will permit the education of advanced undergraduates in the Prescott area. NAU also seeks to extend and strengthen relationships with other institutions of higher education in the region. The Walnut Creek Partnership illustrates the development of such collaborative programs. One of the strengths of the proposed partnership is the opportunity for developing innovative educational programs. NAU is working closely other WCCER partners to develop a shared curriculum, involving faculty and students from multiple institutions. This approach would broaden the expertise available to students, and it would also create economies of scale, allowing the development of more ambitious programs than would be possible for any single institution. Primary focus would be at the undergraduate level, with additional opportunities for secondary-education students, graduate students, and faculty. Undergraduate teaching will provide exposure to field science and hands-on discovery-oriented learning.

Entomology: An example of the educational efforts mentioned above is the annual field trip taken by the entomology class to the WCCER. Because the area has such a rich arthropod fauna, students can complete their class collection in a weekend. Concomitantly, the student collections are being used to develop a general collection for the habitats encompassed by the center. The goal is to create a reference collection that will be used for assessing restoration projects, selecting candidate species for monitoring programs, and providing a reference collection for future biodiversity studies. To date over 300 species have been collected at the center.