| 1 | <p>Students engage with long-term environmental and phenology data sets (spanning over 40 years) collected at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, a high-elevation field station in Colorado, to explore the effects of climate change on the phenology of migrating and hibernating species. After becoming familiar with the geographic context, people involved with the data collection, and organisms studied through background readings and videos, students explore the raw data set in Excel and/or using an interactive data visualization tool. In small groups, students reproduce figures and regressions from Inouye et al. (2000) based on those data, then expand their analyses with data collected during the subsequent decade. By comparing analyses that encompass different time spans, students evaluate the original interpretations from Inouye et al. (2000), explain possible discrepancies, and generate predictions for future patterns. Finally, students build upon their initial analyses by developing and testing hypotheses about patterns found in other organisms in the data set, and combine these to discuss the ecological consequences of shifting plant and animal phenology in group presentations.</p>
| 1 | <p>This adaptation combines the teaching module ‘<i>The Biology of Climate Change: The effects of a changing climate on migrating and over-wintering species at a high-elevation field station’</i> (Wu and Ellwein 2017) with a new dataset from a long-term Warming Meadow Experiment led by Dr. John Harte and colleagues monitoring biomass accumulation in shrubs in forbs in response to experimental warming (Harte and Shaw 1995, Price and Waser 1998, Saleska et al. 2002, Harte et al. 2015). The goal of this adaptation is to test hypotheses associated with phenological changes over time and examine the consequences of phenological mis-match between species, while developing skills associated with data visualization and analysis using observational and manipulated field experiments. This activity is designed to be carried out in a 1.15 hr lecture style course with potential options for homework as assigned.</p>
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