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 ...

Unit 2: Causes of Mass Extinction part of Changing Biosphere
During Unit 2, students will learn about the causes of two past mass extinctions and discuss the controversies surrounding these causes and the evidence upon which the theories in the debates are based. Before ...

Unit 4: Impacts of Environmental Change on Organisms: Horses part of Changing Biosphere
In this unit, students will gain a deep-time perspective on how life evolves on a dynamic planet. They will use the Equidae (horse family) as a case study to examine the relationship among climate, biomes, and ...

Unit 1: Ocean Introduction part of Ocean Sustainability
In this unit, students explore the role of ocean circulation in climate modification and bioproductivity. The activities require students to interpret the effect of horizontal and vertical seawater movement on heat ...

Unit 5: Oceans in Protection: Marine Protected Areas part of Ocean Sustainability
Students will review current ocean pressures related to overfishing and human impacts on ocean ecosystems. By examining data collected in relation to the presence of marine reserves, students will explore long-term ...

Unit 3: Oceans As Habitat: Sustaining Life in the Ocean part of Ocean Sustainability
Students will be able to identify the functional roles that organisms play in ocean ecosystems. How do human-induced changes in ocean conditions affect biodiversity, and thereby the health and resilience of a coral ...

Unit 2: Ocean Conditions: Ancient to Modern part of Ocean Sustainability
Students will be provided with seawater pH and carbon dioxide concentration (pCO2) data spanning as far back as 1850. They will describe trends in pH, pCO2 and atmospheric CO2 concentration, outline why these ...

Modeling Rare Plant Distributions Using ArcGIS part of Teach the Earth:Teaching Activities
In this activity, students work with rare plant occurrence data from the Nature Reserve of Orange County, California to create species distribution maps in ArcGIS. Students are given shapefiles of species ...

Unit 6: Ocean Preservation: Sustaining Our Oceanic Resources part of Ocean Sustainability
Students are introduced to the concept of geoengineering, "the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's climate system, in order to moderate global warming" (The Royal Society). The goal is ...

Unit 4: Oceans In Peril: Pressures on Ocean Ecosystems part of Ocean Sustainability
Students will read and summarize an article that details scientific studies on behavioral changes of gray whales. Discussed are their feeding behavior, migratory behavior, and breeding patterns in the Pacific. ...

Using MATLAB to understand distributions: Pokémon GO part of Teaching Computation with MATLAB:MATLAB Workshop 2016:Teaching Activities
This problem set will help teach students how to describe real world distributions. Data science skills that will be covered include measures of central tendency and spread, transformations of distributions, ...

Understanding Uncertainty in Ecological Forecasts part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Ecological forecasting is a tool that can be used for understanding and predicting changes in populations, communities, and ecosystems. Ecological forecasting is an emerging approach which provides an estimate of ...

Botany Field Observations part of E-STEM:Field Course:ESTEM-PD Activities
Plants form the link between the abiotic features of landscape (rock, soils, water, etc.) and the biotic world. California has a very rich and complex flora, making species identification sometimes very difficult. ...

Organismal Form and Function Lab part of CUREnet:CURE Collection
Invertebrates use movement of their bodies and structures in diverse ways to interact with their environment. This includes general locomotion (e.g., walking, jumping, flying) to specific forms of locomotion (e.g., gliding on water), using limbs to acquire food (e.g., raptorial forelegs in the praying mantis) and using structures to communicate (e.g., cricket calls). These movements have been the focus of bioinspiration studies to understand how these small organisms, with compact nervous systems, are able to achieve their movements. Given the diversity of invertebrates and the lack of information on the variation in their movements, the goals of this course are to understand the variation in invertebrate movement and explore the factors that may affect that variation. In this course, students have the opportunity to develop and test their own research hypotheses associated with variation in the movement of invertebrates. Using high-speed cameras, students are instructed on filming techniques to quantify animal movement, the use of the R programming language to obtain basic kinematics of movement and analyze their data, and the process of science from hypothesis formation to presentation of results. Research questions change each iteration based upon the hypotheses students develop, but the same instructional material and skillsets (e.g., quantifying animal movement) are consistently used. Results from each student group are presented during a departmental wide poster symposium and can be written up for publication, where applicable.

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. ...

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 ...

Put out the Fire! Exploring the Effects of Fire-Fighting Foams on Microorganisms using Statistics and Plots part of Teaching Computation with MATLAB:MATLAB Workshop 2020:Activities
Objective Analyze a subset of data from a published research paper using MATLAB. This will focus on data manipulation in MATLAB, including reading in text files, for, if, and while statements, statistics, and plot ...

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 ...