ABOUT THE PROJECT

The National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis was founded in 1995 with a mission to promote the sharing and use of ecological data to solve environmental problems.  The center promotes science in a number ways – through scientific working groups in which scientists from around the world meet to work on specific problems, through resident scientists, most of whom are fresh out of PhD programs, and through distinguished visiting scientists who come to the center for varying lengths of time.

One very successful NCEAS program has been the “Distributed Graduate Seminar” (DGS) series.  In a DGS, a large research project is broken up into pieces and distributed to small graduate courses all over the country.  These graduate courses work only on this specific project and then contribute their piece to the overall analysis.  Past distributed graduate seminars have examined issues like the scientific basis for endangered species recovery plans, the role of marine reserves in conserving coastal ecosystems, and the economic impacts of forest pests amd pathogens.  Many of these projects have led to important scientific findings and had an impact on conservation policy.    

The goal of this project is to do something similar at the undergraduate level.  We chose this specific project (invasive plants in National Wildlife Refuges) because most undergraduate ecology and conservation biology classes cover invasive species and because a dataset was available and ready to be analyzed.  The dataset is also of a manageable size – because this is the first project like this that we’ve done with undergraduates, we didn’t want 40 or 50 different classes involved.  We have enrolled 8 classes in the project, and each class has about 50 refuges to compile and analyze. 

Your class was chosen because of your instructor’s interest in the project and because of her expertise with these issues.  We hope you’ll enjoy working on this, and we hope you’ll learn something from the experience.  We also hope to get some real science done.

Sincerely,

Dr. David Marsh

National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis