Field Ecology

Description

This year-long program will focus on intensive group and individual field research on current topics in ecology. Students will be expected to intensively use the primary literature and student-driven field research to address observations about ecological composition, structure and function in natural environments. Students will participate in field trips to sites in the Pacific Northwest and the Southwest (U.S.). Students will be expected to develop multiple independent and group research projects in local forests in the south Puget Sound, the Evergreen campus forest reserve, national forests, national parks, state forests and other relevant natural settings.

During each quarter, we will work as a community to develop and implement multiple field projects based on: 1) rapid observation and field data collection and analysis workshops; 2) participation in large multi-year studies based in Washington and more distant field sites; and 3) student originated short and long-term studies. In fall quarter, students will focus on field sampling, natural history, library research and scientific writing skills to develop workable field data collection protocols for field trips. In the winter, students will learn to analyze ecological data using a variety of laboratory and statistical analytical approaches, and they will further refine their research and scientific writing skills through the development of research proposals for team-designed field projects that will be implemented during spring quarter. In spring quarter, students will demonstrate their research, natural history and analytical skills via group and individual research projects. Student manuscripts will be "crystallized" through a series of intensive multi-day paper-writing workshops in which group and individual papers will be produced. Research projects will also be formally presented by groups and individuals in the final weeks of the quarter at a public research exposition. Finally, all written research projects will be reviewed by external experts, revised and bound together in a single printed journal-format volume.

Specific topics of study will include community and ecosystem ecology, plant physiology, forest structure, ecological restoration, riparian ecology, fire disturbance effects, bird abundance and monitoring, insect-plant interactions, disturbance ecology, and the broad fields of bio-complexity and ecological interactions. We will emphasize identification of original field research problems in diverse habitats, experimentation, data analyses, oral presentation of findings, and writing in journal format.