In this lesson, students explore the importance of albedo (or reflectivity) to penguins and the surfaces they inhabit and learn how penguin colonies may be mapped using satellites.

What happens when the ground under your feet is ice and it's moving? This video segment adapted from NOVA features some of the dangers faced by scientists conducting research in Antarctica.

This short video examines the recent melting ice shelves in the Antarctica Peninsula; the potential collapse of West Antarctic ice shelf; and how global sea levels, coastal cities, and beaches would be affected.

This video segment adapted from NOVA uses microwave images to reveal how sea ice doubles the size of Antarctica each winter. Rare footage shows how sea ice crushed the famous ship Endurance in 1914.

This classroom activity introduces students to Antarctica's organisms, landscapes, and seascapes. After examining the images in the photo gallery, students work in small groups to discuss their conclusions about the living conditions on this continent. The printable three-page handout includes a series of questions to help students structure their thoughts while viewing the gallery images and a group worksheet that guides students through a discussion of their evolving hypotheses and conclusions.

This presentation offers an overview of the developing concept of The Anthropocene -- a term coined to describe our current geological epoch, in which human impact on the planet will leave a permanent trace.

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger’s 1944 question, “What Is Life?” today.

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology — ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic — are changing. The course also examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, asks how we might answer Erwin Schrödinger's 1944 question, "What Is Life?", today.

This course applies the tools of anthropology to examine biology in the age of genomics, biotechnological enterprise, biodiversity conservation, pharmaceutical bioprospecting, and synthetic biology. It examines such social concerns such as bioterrorism, genetic modification, and cloning. It offers an anthropological inquiry into how the substances and explanations of biology—ecological, organismic, cellular, molecular, genetic, informatic—are changing. It examines such artifacts as cell lines, biodiversity databases, and artificial life models, and using primary sources in biology, social studies of the life sciences, and literary and cinematic materials, and asks how we might answer Erwin Schrodinger's 1944 question, "What Is Life?" today.

This class has been reorganized to focus primarily on the War in Iraq. As in previous years, the class still examines war in cross-cultural perspective, asking whether war is intrinsic to human nature, what causes war, how particular cultural experiences of war differ, and how war has affected American culture.

The pork chops you buy in the supermarket neatly packaged in plastic and styrofoam may look completely sterile, but are, in fact, likely to be contaminated with disease-causing bacteria - and not with just any old bugs, but with hard-to-treat, antibiotic resistant strains. In a recently published study, researchers with the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System bought meat from a wide sampling of chain grocery stores across the country and analyzed the bacteria on the meat. Resistant microbes were found in 81% of ground turkey samples, 69% of pork chops, 55% of ground beef samples, and 39% of chicken parts.

Finding and eradicating invasive plants is a tough job that requires constant vigilance. County-scale maps that show where invasive plants are and where they have the potential to spread in the future are helping on-the-ground efforts to build the resilience of natural vegetation.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an increasingly serious threat to global public health. New resistance mechanisms reduce our ability to treat common infectious diseases. Although microorganisms possessing AMR genes are thought to have emerged from natural habitats, better understanding is needed. A new study sought to examine the consequences of introducing antimicrobials into natural environments. Using lichen – a model for well-defined micro-ecosystems consisting of hundreds of microbial species – researchers evaluated changes in microbial communities following exposure to different antimicrobials. They found that the native lichen microbiome comprises highly diverse and low-abundance intrinsic antimicrobial resistance genes (ARGs) to cope with antimicrobial pressure. Antimicrobial-specific shifts occurred in the structure and function of the microbiome following 10 days of exposure to antimicrobials..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies, Asao B. Inoue theorizes classroom writing assessment as a complex system that is "more than" its interconnected elements. To explain how and why antiracist work in the writing classroom is vital to literacy learning, Inoue incorporates ideas about the white racial habitus that informs dominant discourses in the academy and other contexts. Inoue helps teachers understand the unintended racism that often occurs when teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments. Drawing on his own teaching and classroom inquiry, Inoue offers a heuristic for developing and critiquing writing assessment ecologies that explores seven elements of any writing assessment ecology: power, parts, purposes, people, processes, products, and places.

Citizen scientist Anya, an indigenous Siberian girl, witnesses the changes in her community as a result of climate change after working with Woods Hole scientist Max Holmes' research team aboard her father's ship. She gets involved in collecting water samples to learn, and teach her schoolmates about, global warming.

The eBook “Applications of Plant Pathology in Genebank Collections” was developed in part by USDA-ARS and by grant 2020-70003-30930 from the USDA-NIFA-Higher Education Challenge Grant Program. Additional chapters will be added to this eBook when they are available. This eBook contains chapters that can be accessed in any order. Click on “Contents” in the upper left corner and then expand “Main Body” to access chapter titles; scrolling may be necessary to view all chapter titles. Chapters can also be navigated by using arrows at the bottom of each page. Each chapter has text, video and/or interactive content on a single page.

Applied ecology is a framework for the application of knowledge about ecosystems so that actions can be taken to create a better balance and harmony between people and nature in order to reduce human impact on other beings and their habitats.

About this book
Origin story
I (Erin) began this book project after participating in the Open Pedagogy Incubator hosted by the NC State University Libraries in 2020, with the goal of making my course materials – and information about Applied Ecology – more broadly accessible to students, educators, and the general public. Rather than impose my sole voice, perspective, and biases, I restructured my course assignments to enable student creation of the content you will encounter in this book. The assignments are open-ended and open-world, motivating students to collaborate with each other and to seek knowledge beyond the classroom, and thus embody core characteristics of the discipline of Applied Ecology as well as Open Education and Universal Design for Learning. I hope that by centering student voices and by highlighting diverse scientists, research systems and ecosystems, this work empowers the reader and highlights the relevance of Applied Ecology in our everyday lives.

Intended use
This book is formatted to provide information about key ecological principles, concepts, and processes, explored and applied across various contexts. The text can be used as a foundational or supplementary text for ecology courses, or as a standalone reference for students in formal academic settings or beyond.

The Vocabulary terms at the beginning of each chapter are listed in the order that students will encounter them while reading the blog-style summary for that chapter. The Glossary lists all terms in the entire book in alphabetical order, for quick reference as needed.

We have provided an appendix with skeletal outlines that students can use to guide their notetaking. I also intend to compile a companion volume for educators, containing templates for each assignment used to guide the student works presented here.

Accessibility
We use sans-serif fonts to facilitate readability in digital format and by readers who are neurodivergent. We also support screen readership through alt-text images.

A series of 6 Excel-based projects on the mathematics of biodiversity for basic college math classes and developmental math classes. Students learn about the structure of biodiversity, the application of many basic data analysis skills, and the use of Excel for analysis and data presentation.