Quantitative Teaching of Abiotic-Biotic Interactions in Aquatic and Terrestrial Ecosystems

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This award provides funds to The Kellogg Biological Station at Michigan State University to purchase four items: two basic gas chromatographies, a scanning spectrophotometer, and a pH meter. Currently, The Kellogg Biological Station summer teaching program offers a diversity of undergraduate courses in ecology which emphasize hands-on, field experience in a small group setting. Several of the courses discuss aspects both of ecosystem processes and of population ecology. With this new equipment they will eliminate from the teaching curriculum the separation of ecology into ecosystem-based and population-based concepts and instead, integrate both along the lines of biogeochemistry and trophic interactions. To enhance this new teaching focus, they wish to create a more quantitative framework for those field/laboratory exercises which illustrate interactions between abiotic and biotic components of terrestrial and aquatic model systems. These instruments will be used by students to quantify inorganic and organic precursors and products of organism activities, pigments of primary producers, and other important abiotic and biotic aspects of communities. The field/laboratory exercises made possible by this instrumentation will provide students a practical "feel" for the conceptual integration of two important areas in ecology. The grantee institution is matching this NSF award with funds from non-Federal sources.