Sustainability Metrics
Natalie Hunt, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Sustainability is a complex term applied to many different contexts in a variety of ways. As a result, it can be challenging to determine how sustainable something really is. In this module, students will use an ...

Assessing the Risk of Invasive Species Using Community Science Data
Matthew Heard, Belmont University
This module introduces students who are already familiar with GIS to doing comparative analyses with large-scale community science (often called citizen science) data sets. Students will explore how we can use ...

Plate Tectonics: GPS Data, Boundary Zones, and Earthquake Hazards
Christopher Berg, Orange Coast College; Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope; Julie Elliott, Michigan State University
Students work with high precision GPS data to explore how motion near a plate boundary is distributed over a larger region than the boundary line on the map. This allows them to investigate how earthquake hazard ...

Remote Sensing of Plants and Topography in R
Kyla Dahlin, Michigan State University
This module introduces students who are already familiar with remote sensing and R to doing quantitative analyses with large spatial data sets. Students will explore different possible abiotic drivers of plant ...

Paleoclimate and Ocean Biogeochemistry
Allison Jacobel, Middlebury College
This module guides students through an examination of how surface ocean productivity relates to global climate on glacial-interglacial timescales and how the availability of ocean nutrients can be correlated with ...

Nutrient Monitoring in the Chesapeake Bay
Akinyele Oni, Morgan State University; Niangoran Koissi, Morgan State University
The Chesapeake Bay waters receive input from rivers and streams from areas of Washington D.C, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, West Virginia, and some parts of New York and Pennsylvania. Historically, humongous ...

Wind and Ocean Ecosystems
Alanna Lecher, Lynn University; April Watson, Lynn University
Wind has a fundamental impact on ocean ecosystems. Wind drives physical processes, including current development and upwelling through Ekman transport. These physical processes, in turn, have cascading impacts on ...

Biodiversity
Robin Collins, Champlain College
In this module, students will analyze data from the Florida Keys Reef Visual Census (FKRVS), a long-term monitoring effort of key reef fish populations in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Students will calculate the species richness as well as the Shannon index and Pielou's evenness index across different years of data and between different reef types. Furthermore, students will explore how years with high frequencies of hurricanes impact these measures. The module culminates with students writing a summary finding of how reef types and hurricane frequency will impact the FKRVS in the future.

Climate Drivers of Phenology
Emily Mohl, Saint Olaf College
Many species' life cycles are strongly influenced by temperature, but other cues, like day length and precipitation, can also trigger life cycle changes. Phenology is a way of recording the time when events, ...

Environmental Pollution & Public Health
Alanna Lecher, Lynn University
Environmental health is a field of study within public health that is concerned with human-environment interactions, and specifically, how the environment influences public well-being. In this module, students will explore how environmental pollution impacts public health through comparing cancer rates of areas with known environmental pollutants to the national average through a t-test. Students can further their knowledge by comparing the concentrations of atmospheric pollutants in areas with known sources to control sites without such sources. Project EDDIE modules are designed with an A-B-C structure to make them flexible and adaptable to a range of student levels and course structures.

Green Infrastructure/Green Roofs
Elizabeth Farrell, Nassau Community College
Runoff in urban areas is an increasingly important issue when it comes to water quality. It is a major hydrologic issue in New York City, as urban infrastructure creates excess runoff and impervious surfaces ...

Biomes, Vegetation Structure, and Canopy Height
Mary Mulcahy, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford
Students will develop a concept of vegetation structure and biomes through an exploration of field site data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) project. Students will compare characteristics of major groups of plants with respect to heat and drought tolerance, develop hypotheses for how canopy height may vary by several abiotic factors, and evaluate their hypotheses using graphed data, trendlines and r-squared values.

Bomb Cyclones - They're Explosive!
Jacqui Degan, Cape Fear Community College
Storms can have devastating impacts on coastal communities. Typically, tropical storms like hurricanes get the most attention, but there are other types of storms that occur at more northern latitudes that can be ...

Paleoclimate of the last 2k years
Sean Bryan, Colorado State University
Paleoclimate data provide essential information about Earth's temperature prior to the instrumental record. These data give us context for recent anthropogenic (human-caused) warming; they provide insight into ...

Hypoxia in Coastal Marine Ecosystems
Annette Brickley; Kathy Browne, Rider University; Gabriela Smalley, Rider University
Aquatic ecosystems are home to a complex intersection of physical and biological factors and an intersection of natural and anthropogenic factors. In the Chesapeake Bay, low oxygen events have occurred periodically ...

Prairie Eco Services
Kelly Knight, Houston Community College System
As densely populated urban areas continue to expand, human activity is removing much-needed greenspaces from our communities; in turn, we are also removing critical buffers that are needed to combat air and water ...

GLOBE and My NASA Data Collection, Visualization and Analysis through Concept Mapping
Adriana Perez, El Paso Community College; John Olgin, El Paso Community College
Through the use of GLOBE Observer app, and My NASA data, students will explore the acquisition, visualization and analysis of data. Students will follow the scientific method to better understand the steps in the acquisition, analysis and interpretation of data. Students will be exposed to the value of citizen science and the role of science in our lives. Students will learn to identify basic cloud types and features with the My NASA cloud sorting cloud activity and sky watcher cloud chart (background knowledge), utilize the GLOBE Observer app to collect cloud and dust data across different locations and time frames (data acquisition), upload the data to the GLOBE NASA database, and then work with the Earth System Data Explorer to visualize, analyze, and interpret how these different kinds of data are used by scientists to understand the natural world and complex processes and interactions of Earth's spheres (data visualization and analysis). Finally, students will produce a series of cumulative concept maps as they evaluate the steps in the data acquisition, analysis and interpretation process through the GLOBE app, and My NASA site's Earth System Data Explorer.

Where Does Stream Water Come From?
Christa Torrens, University of Colorado at Boulder
In this module, students explore various sources of stream water through reading, discussion, and data analysis in R. The module focuses on streams from four distinct LTER sites: an Antarctic desert stream, an Arizona desert stream, an Arctic tundra stream, and a temperate forest stream in New England.

How Do We Measure Biodiversity: Exploring Biodiversity Metrics Using Avian Communities
Jeffrey Brown, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus
This activity is designed to illustrate various ways that biodiversity can be measured and to highlight what we can learn about an ecological community from different metrics. Students will explore biodiversity metrics (i.e., species richness and Shannon diversity) using point count data on birds collected from the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Term Ecological Research program. Specifically, students will investigate how bird richness and abundance have changed over time and create figures to compare abundance across landscapes and time.

Major Ions in Freshwater Systems
Megan Kelly, Loyola University Chicago
Dissolved ions are present in all freshwater systems, but humans can change the chemical composition of freshwater in several ways. In this activity, students will examine the concentration of major ions in ...

Exploring diatom biodiversity in the Everglades and Caribbean wetlands
Katherine Johnson, Florida International University; Gabriel Kamener, Florida International University
Water quality assessments frequently include biological indicators to evaluate aquatic ecosystem habitat type and health. Because diatoms are ubiquitous and are found in habitats where macroinvertebrates are not, ...

Exploring the relationship between periphyton and water quality in karstic wetlands
Gabriel Kamener, Florida International University; Katherine Johnson, Florida International University
Physicochemical properties and nutrients drive aquatic processes that sustain biota. Therefore, aquatic assessments usually investigate these variables as well as biological indicators to gain a better ...

Investigating Bacterial Contamination in Snapfinger Creek
Samantha Andrews, Georgia State University
Water quality is a global concern for natural and potable water sources. Lack of access to clean water due to poor sanitation can lead to microbial disease outbreaks, such as cholera, that can cause serious ...

Tracking hot spots and hot moments in an urban freshwater estuary
Gaston Small, University of St. Thomas (MN)
This module explores the hydrology and biogeochemistry of the St. Louis River Estuary (Duluth, Minnesota). The overarching question of the module is: when, and where, is the estuary acting as a source vs. a sink ...

Exploring the Global Carbon Budget
Dan Maxbauer, Carleton College
How much carbon is emitted each year due to human activity? How does that number compare to rates of exchange between carbon cycle reservoirs? Where do our carbon emissions go? In this module, students will explore global carbon budget data to 1) determine the rate of change in carbon emissions, 2) explore changes in carbon cycle sinks over time to investigate where carbon emissions end up, and 3) determine what kinds of rates of change are needed to reduce carbon emissions to zero in the future.

Phenology Trends and Climate Change in Minnesota
Pamela Freeman, The College of Saint Scholastica
Seasonal events, for example flowering, fruiting, and the return of migrating birds, happen at particular times of the year. Some of these events happen in relation to climate, while others are dependent on other ...

Distribution and Fate of Volatile Organic Contaminants (VOCs)
Federico Sinche, Loyola University Chicago
Volatile organic contaminants (VOCs) are organic compounds generated from different industrial processes around the world. VOCs are ubiquitous contaminants, and some can be genotoxic, mutagenic and act as endocrine disruptors, thus representing a risk to ecosystems and human health. High levels of VOCs have been reported in industrialized countries such as the US. In this module, students will explore how the distribution of VOCs has changed over time. Students will then compare types and concentrations of VOCs among the US states in the context of geography, urbanization, industrialization, and fossil emissions as contributing factors of air pollution.

Museum Collections: Junk Drawers or Mirrors of Fossil Diversity?
David Cordie, Edgewood College
Are museum collections a perfect reflection of diversity in the past, or are they a junk drawer full of odds and ends that just happen to be collected? The fossil record is the best tool we have for studying ...