LAS is instituting a long-term student-based inquiry into climate and ecology that will monitor plants at various altitudes and observe how they are changing over time. To understand plant ecology, one needs to know the exact temperature that plants are actually growing in, rather than regional averages. To understand the effects of a changing climate, you also need to know those same highly localized temperatures. This can only be done with sensors in the field that continuously record temperatures. The standard approach is with 2-meter poles that have temperature sensors at fixed heights. The data from these poles are collected by scientists (in our case, student-scientists) who then analyze those temperature patterns and correlate them with species and change.