Nutrient Loading Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Estimating nutrient loads is a critical concept for students studying water quality in a variety of environmental settings. Many STEM/Environmental science students will be asked to assess the impacts of a proposed anthropogenic activities on human water resources and/or ecosystems as part of their future careers. This module engages students in exploring factors contributing to the actual loads of nitrogen that are transmitted down streams. Nitrogen is a key water quality contaminant contributing to surface water quality issues in fresh, salt, and estuarine environments. Students will utilize real-time nitrate data from the US Geological Survey to calculate nitrate loads for several locations and investigate the interplay of concentration and discharge that contributes to calculated loads.

An Arabidopsis Mutant Screen CURE for a Cell and Molecular Biology Laboratory Course part of CUREnet:CURE Collection
This CURE is designed from a crucial component of a chloroplast lipid signaling research project and has been implemented for a cell and molecular biology laboratory course at Michigan State University. The research laboratory generated an engineered plant line producing a lipid-derived plant hormone and mutagenized this line. The research question is "what transporters or receptors are involved in the hormone signaling transduction or perception processes?". Students form research hypotheses based on the research model, design experiments, perform experiments, collect and analyze data, make scientific arguments, and share their findings with the learning community. Specifically, the students culture the mutagenized plant population and select the desired mutant phenotypes, followed by genotyping the mutants and characterizing the mutants by basic biochemical approaches. Mathematics is also integrated into the course design. As the students studied the relevant genetic, molecular and biochemical concepts during this CURE, they use the core idea of information flow and data they generate in the lab to make claims about their mutant plants and support these claims with evidence and reasoning.

Nutrient Monitoring in the Chesapeake Bay part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
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 ...

Water Quality Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Water quality is a critical concept for undergraduate students studying Earth Sciences, Biology, and Environmental Sciences. Many of these students will be asked to assess the impacts of a proposed anthropogenic ...

Assessing the Risk of Invasive Species Using Community Science Data part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
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 ...

Module 4 Polar Ecosystems part of Oceans in the News:Oceans in the News – Polar Ocean Science, Data, and the Media
This module follows logically from the previous and gives a biological context to sea ice. Students will review knowledge about seasonal trends in sea ice and learn how this impacts organisms that live in polar ...

Wind and Ocean Ecosystems part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
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 ...

Introduction to strings and DNA/protein sequence alignments part of Teaching Computation with MATLAB:MATLAB Workshop 2018:Activities
This is problem set that helps solidify concepts of computational processing (accessing data, parsing data, visualizing data, using preconstructed tools) and sequence matching, specifically in the context of ...

Module 5 Human Dimensions in the Poles part of Oceans in the News:Oceans in the News – Polar Ocean Science, Data, and the Media
This unit covers the concept of bioaccumulation of contaminants in a food web, all the way up to humans. Students learn about what constitutes a contaminant, how contaminants can accumulate in an organism and move ...

Using Ecological Forecasts to Guide Decision Making part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Because of increased variability in populations, communities, and ecosystems due to land use and climate change, there is a pressing need to know the future state of ecological systems across space and time. ...

Lake Mixing Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Stratified lakes exhibit vertical gradients in organisms, nutrients, and oxygen, which have important implications for ecosystem structure and functioning. Mixing disrupts these gradients by redistributing these ...

Paleoclimate and Ocean Biogeochemistry part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
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 ...

Capstone Project Stage 1 part of Future of Food
The goal of the Future Food Scenarios capstone project is for the students to investigate the food systems in a particular region in depth, and in particular to identify the current situation, determine the ...

Climate Change Mind Map part of Curriculum for the Bioregion:Activities

Unit 5.1 - Water Balance of a Tree part of Critical Zone Science
The assignment is to calculate an annual water balance for a tree using data gathered at the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory. In the framework of experimental design, students will organize around a ...

Unit 6.1 - Biogeochemical Modeling Framework part of Critical Zone Science
In this unit, students will learn about the dynamic movement of nutrients among and within ecosystems primarily through the reading and discussion of scientific literature. This unit is generally subdivided into ...

Unit 6.2 - Biogeochemical Examples part of Critical Zone Science
In this week-long unit students will explore Critical Zone function and dynamics as they relate to nutrient cycling in agricultural systems and nutrient pollution into aquatic systems. This unit is generally ...

Unit 2.2 - Basic Critical Zone Concepts part of Critical Zone Science
Students will learn about geoscience-specific methods used to analyze data in the Critical Zone from data-driven activities and short presentations by their peers. The topics include the use of carbon isotopes, ...

Unit 4.2 - Carbon Budgets part of Critical Zone Science
The purpose of this unit is to explore, compare, contrast, and interpret carbon fluxes from the Ameriflux network to better appreciate the critical factors that account for the different timing and magnitudes of ...

Unit 5: The Sixth Extinction part of Changing Biosphere
In this unit, students will prepare by reading a couple of articles describing the causes and rates of mass extinctions, including the current "Sixth Extinction," and why conservation is important to ...