Description

In the spring of 2018 I participated in the National Ecological Observatory Network’s (NEON) Faculty Mentoring Network (FMN) hosted by QUBES (https://qubeshub.org/). As part of this community I implemented and adapted the interactive lesson “Quantifying the Drivers and Impacts of Natural Disturbance Events-The 2013 Colorado Floods” developed by Leah Wasser and Megan Jones (https://www.neonscience.org/tm-disturbance-events-co13flood). This lesson uses natural disasters and subsequent ecological disturbance events as a tool to illustrate the complexity of environmental science. The Colorado flood lesson explores: 1) drought, 2) precipitation, and 3) stream discharge as factors leading up to the intense floods of 2013. In southern California we rarely experience floods as natural disasters; however threats from fires and severe drought conditions are real-world problems that students constantly confront. Two recent examples are: 1) the state of California was in an official drought from 2011-2017, and 2) in December 2017 the Thomas fire located in Santa Barbara County burned 281,893 acres from Dec 4^th to January 12^th and the Skirball fire located in Los Angeles County burned 422 acres from Dec 6^th through the 15^th.  Students at Mount Saint Mary’s University Chalon campus had to be evacuated and finals were postponed. I used the California drought and fires as personal examples to frame a lesson investigating the multi-layered environmental drivers of natural disasters in an introductory environmental science class for non-science majors.

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