In this module, students explore changes in butterfly phenology through the use of natural history collections data.

Effective teaching and learning of population ecology requires integration of quantitative literacy skills. To facilitate student learning in population ecology and provide students with the opportunity to develop and apply quantitative skills, we designed a clicker-based lesson in which students investigate how ecologists measure and model population size. This lesson asks students to "engage like scientists" as they make predictions, plot data, perform calculations, and evaluate evidence. The lesson was taught in three sections of a large enrollment undergraduate class and assessed using a pre/post-test, in-class clicker-based questions, and multiple-choice exam questions. Student performance increased following peer discussion of clicker questions and on post-test questions. Students also performed well on the end-of-unit exam questions.

Ebola, Zika, the recall of contaminated lettuce - these are just a few recent outbreaks making headlines. Students should be able to connect what they learn in their biology courses to explain these events happening around them. Unfortunately, students do not necessarily make those connections. Therefore, it is important, as instructors, to provide opportunities where students engage with societal issues and problems related to course content and case studies, using headlines from the news are one way to do this.

Here I describe a case study about Lyme disease that engages students in learning about the ecology of infectious disease. Lyme disease incidence has tripled in the last 15 years and is estimated to affect 300,000 Americans annually. This lesson uses an NPR news audio clip containing interviews with two disease ecologists, Rick Ostfeld and Felicia Keesing, who describe predicting Lyme disease incidence by measuring mice populations. The activities in this lesson explore factors that led to the recent surge in Lyme disease. In small collaborative groups, students analyze data figures from publications by the Ostfeld and Keesing labs (along with others) to construct an understanding of the ecology of Lyme disease and predict how changes to the ecosystem could affect Lyme disease incidence. This case study lesson could be relevant to those teaching microbiology, ecology, public health or biology for majors.

Resource from the 2015 BioQUEST Summer Workshop

Presentation made by Katherine Berry et al. as part of the "Bringing Research Data to the Ecology Classroom: Opportunities, Barriers, and Next Steps” Session at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting, August 8th, 2017, Portland Oregon

Slides and related materials from the presentation given by Dr. Lisa Corwin as a part of the 2020 BIOME Institute.

My class used Water Balance of a Tree (Unit 5.1) to begin quantifying the fundamental pathways for water movement within a forest. The ultimate goal was to model transpiration of the redwood forest on the UC Santa Cruz campus.

Poster on encouraging civic and scientific literacy presented at the 2018 QUBES/BioQUEST Summer Workshop

In this lab, students will work with a simple algae/brine shrimp environment to learn about food chains and population dynamics. It was implemented with limited alteration for an Introductory Ecology course.

Step-by-step, hands-on instruction on ways to access and download these specimen data, how to process climate layer data, and how to apply Maxent software to construct ecological niche models.

Free and self-paced tutorials and courses for learning to code out of the University of Edinburgh

As with many other complex topics, teaching ecosystem ecology can be particularly difficult in terms of helping students understand the relationships between the various component parts. We addressed this challenge in a general ecology course by developing a lesson plan based on pathway maps. Pathway maps are very similar to concept maps but allow students to specifically address whether the links are positive or negative relationships. While the students created pathway maps collaboratively during class, they explicitly concentrated on the relationships between different concepts in ecosystem ecology. Each group of students then reviewed the pathway maps of another group to identify pathway map links that might be incorrect or poorly described. Students then investigated these flagged links of their own pathway maps by searching the primary literature for data that supported or refuted the questionable link in their pathway map. Each group then wrote a short paper presenting and interpreting the data that they found. The Pathway Mapping activity appeared to promote both big-picture thinking about ecosystem ecology and also a useful venue for students to evaluate a model (their pathway map) with data (from the primary literature). We feel that the Pathway Mapping framework is quite flexible and could be used to positive effect in a large number of courses.  

University capstone projects can offer science students a rich research experience that illustrates the process of doing scientific research, and can also help students better choose future academic and career pathways. While capstone projects are an effective component of students' learning in the sciences, they are resource and labor intensive for supervising faculty and are not always logistically feasible in understaffed and/or under-resourced departments and colleges. A good compromise is to incorporate a significant research component into upper division classes. This article documents a project I have incorporated into a plant ecology course that I teach every spring. This project gives students a taste of what practicing ecologists do in their professional lives. Students learn how to survey vegetation and environmental factors in the field, apply several statistical analysis techniques, formulate testable hypotheses relevant to a local plant community, analyze a large shared data set, and communicate their findings both in writing and in a public presentation. Over the weeks required for this project, students learn that doing science is quite different from how they typically learn about science. Most say that, while this project is one of the hardest they have completed in their time in university, they appreciate being treated like a fellow scientist rather than as "just a student." Additionally, students' findings often reveal complex and subtle interactions in the plant community sampled, providing further insight to and examples of emergent properties of biological communities.

An introduction to the Scientific Method for Introductory Biology students using plant and animal richness and environmental data from ephemeral ponds and permanent wetlands.

This adaptation consists of three exercises that introduce students to 1) format spreadsheet data tables, 2) carry out spreadsheet quality control, and 3) count/sort/filter data of interest in order to conduct a pilot analysis on NEON small mammal data.

Laboratory experiment included in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) Volume 4

This pdf provides a list of over 100 educational resources related to tools and skills related to ecological forecasting.

Module for practice included in Teaching Issues and Experiments in Ecology (TIEE) Volume 7

I combined material from the Carbon, Climate and Energy Resources Module and the Changing Biosphere Module to help students understand climate change, the carbon cycle, and feedback loops in my intro Ecology class.

Link to Populus Software