The Great Clade Race - Zombie Island Edition part of Teaching Activities
This activity is a modification of the "Great Clade Race" (Goldsmith, 2003). This activity is great for helping students understand cladograms/phylogenies, but the original reinforces some problematic ...

Analyzing datasets in ecology and evolution to teach the nature and process of science part of CUREnet:CURE Collection
This quarter-long project forms the basis of a third-year course for majors and nonmajors at the University of Washington, Bothell called Science Methods and Practice. Students use databases to identify novel research questions, and extract data to test their hypotheses. They frame the question with primary literature, address the questions with inferential statistics, and discuss the results with more primary literature. The product is a scientific paper; each step of the process is scaffolded and evaluated. Given time limitations, we avoid devoting time to data collection; instead, we sharpen students' ability to make sense of a large body of quantitative data, a situation they may rarely have encountered. We treat statistics with a strictly conceptual, pragmatic, and abbreviated approach; i.e., we ask students to know which basic test to choose to assess a linear relationship vs. a difference between two means. We stress the need for a normal distribution in order to use these tests, and how to interpret the results; we leave the rest for stats courses, and we do not teach the mathematics. This approach proves beneficial even to those who have already had a statistics course, because it is often the first time they make decisions about applying statistics to their own research questions. We incorporate peer review and collaborative work throughout the quarter. We form collaborative groups around the research questions they ask, enabling them to share primary literature they find, and preparing them well to review each other's writing. We encourage them to cite each other's work. They write formal peer reviews of each other's papers, and they submit their final paper with a letter-to-the-editor highlighting how their research has addressed previous feedback. A major advantage of this course is that an instructor can easily modify it to suit any area of expertise. Students have worked with data about how a snail's morphology changes in response to its environment (Price, 2012), how students understand genetic drift (Price et al. 2014), maximum body size in the fossil record (Payne et al. 2008), range shifts (Ettinger et al. 2011), and urban crop pollination (Waters and Clifford 2014).

Soil Respiration Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Soils hold more carbon (C) than any other component of the terrestrial biosphere! In this module, students will explore high-frequency, sensor-based datasets documenting climate variables and the emissions of C (as ...

Biomes, Vegetation Structure, and Canopy Height part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
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.

Plankton Lab part of Teaching Activities
Plankton Lab online (developed for remote learning during COVID-19 pandemic); students will explore plankton samples from three different locations in San Francisco Bay, identify organisms, and characterize the ...

Lake Metabolism Module part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Different lakes exhibit a range of catchment sizes, morphometry, and land use that contribute to differences in lake function. These functional differences mean that lakes vary in ecosystem services such as habitat ...

Macro-Scale Feedbacks part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
Environmental phenomena are often driven by multiple factors that interact across space and over time. In freshwater lakes and reservoirs worldwide, carbon cycling and subsequent carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane ...

Prairie Eco Services part of Project EDDIE:Teaching Materials:Modules
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 ...

Unit 4.1 - Energy Budgets part of Critical Zone Science
The purpose of this unit is to explore, compare, contrast, and calculate energy fluxes from different CZO field sites to better appreciate the critical differences in the driving radiative forces affecting each ...

Unit 2.1 - Basic Tools & Analysis part of Critical Zone Science
This unit will introduce methods and data from Critical Zone observatories as well as methods that scientists use in their research. These activities will provide an introduction to methods used in later units and ...