PARENT SESSION
Poster Session 16: Ecology Education
Tuesday, August 9, 5:00 PM - 6:30 PM, Exhibit Hall 220 A-E, Level 2, Palais des congrès de Montréal
A watershed-based interdisciplinary approach to environmental education integrating ecology, hydrology, and geochemistry.
Zhu, Weixing*,1, Graney, Joseph1, Salvage, Karen1, 1 State University of New York - Binghamton, Binghamton, New York, USA
ABSTRACT- Environmental education often lacks interdisciplinary training to help students understand the complexity of the natural world. Many students need hands-on experiences and research-oriented classes to develop the capacity to better link causes with consequences. We have taken an interdisciplinary approach to teach pollutant movement in the watershed where the Binghamton University campus is located. This integration between ecology, hydrology, and geochemistry is supported by an NSF-CCLI (Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement) grant. In the 2004-05 academic year, students in three watershed-related classes are being asked to formulate answers to a set of questions using experiments that they help to design: What are the pH values and the concentrations of inorganic nitrogen (N) in atmospheric deposition and stream water? What are the anthropogenic and natural sources of metal pollution? What differences are expected between input to and export from the watershed and what cause such differences? The fall 2004 Ecosystem Ecology class collected dry and wet atmospheric deposition; stream samples at locations receiving drainage from urban, suburban, and natural sections of the watershed; measured NH4+, NO3-, pH, and conductivity; and archived samples for the spring 2005 Environmental Measurements course for metal quantification. Students found deposition input was acidic but stream output was not; NH4-N and NO3-N were about equal in the input but NO3-N dominated the output; surface water from the campus part of the watershed have N concentrations and conductivity orders of magnitude higher than other parts of the watershed; and a campus stormwater retention pond significantly reduced N export to the stream compared to another sub-watershed without a retention pond. Students also constructed a watershed N mass-balance budget based on both hydrologic and N chemistry data. Data collected in these class projects will be used in the General Ecology course to help students understand the source, fate, and transport of pollutants in the watershed where they come to class (and for many, live in) everyday.
Key words: watershed, interdisciplinary, education, nitrogen