Education Plan

Our educational goal for this project was to produce a set of seven graduate students that completed their doctoral research based on this project. We planned that their studies would be interdisciplinary in scope while specializing on one of the component fields of this project. We promoted the themes of the NSF Biocomplexity Program in their experiences through cooperative inter-field advising, cross-disciplinary research involvement, and a team directed graduate-level course in Biocomplexity Theory, Principles, and Research Methods. Furthermore, we specifically designed this project to provide student settings that would promote depth in scholarship within each chosen field.

Inter-Field Advising

While 28 graduate students worked on this project, seven were funded by this project and eight principal investigators advised. We distributed graduate student funding to achieve a fairly even balance among the 3 major disciplinary realms in the project: Engineering, Ecology, and the synthesis fields of Regional Science and Natural Resources. Each of these three large realms received 2 or 3 funded positions for most or all of the 5-year period. We were committed to recruiting and advising the students to conduct their studies and research in a way that transcends these major disciplinary realms. Our advising aim was to achieve inter-field education of the students supported by this project. Finally, doing inter-field advising allowed all nine lead investigators to have a similarly significant role in graduate Biocomplexity education even though there were fewer students than faculty investigators.

Cross-Disciplinary Research

The proposed study was designed around spatial and temporal scales of interactions and processes rather than the normal disciplinary boundaries. For example, we designed field studies aimed at endogenous ecosystem parameters and processes expected to be responsive to hydrologic change in short time intervals (e.g., days to weeks). The parameters of interest included: nutrients, plankton, water quality, pelagic fish, ichthyoplankton, and internal embayment hydrodynamics. The primary investigators for these tasks included two aquatic ecologists and two engineers. Our field studies were linked in time and we took advantage of close teamwork to measure, model, and understand how this group of rapidly responding ecosystem parameters interact and covary. A similar cross-disciplinary mix of studies was planned for the mid- and long-term time frames and external processes. We expected then, to fit graduate students into this framework and promote cross-disciplinary work with a common spatiotemporal classification and non-traditional disciplinary mix.

Nathan Kelsall's masters work on wetlands has been requested by a number of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River U.S. and Canadian scientists and agency professionals. It is being used to help guide them in their research and modeling efforts and discussions about regulating Great Lakes water levels.

Biocomplexity Graduate Courses

The team of investigators was committed to offering a graduate course on the central concepts behind the project. Our aim was to share classroom sessions on topics relevant to the project and the wider theme of Biocomplexity. A course titled Complex Adaptive Systems in Nature and Society was offered early in the project. The course covered evidence for order at the whole system level, and explored ecosystem dynamics as transitions among varied states. Principles and properties of complex adaptive systems were covered and then more detail was reviewed for different systems such as cells, ecosystems, turbulence, forests, human organizations, politics, economies, and others. The course was open to graduate students and advanced, select undergraduate students with many field represented. The three participating Universities (Cornell, SUNY Environmental Science and Forestry, and Syracuse University) had students in the course making the class unique in being multi-institutional.

A graduate level Seminar in Biocomplexity started in 2002 with weekly discussions through mid-2003 on topics related to biocomplexity research as well as results and plans of members of the research group.

Another course was taught by J. Gamarra (Project Post Doctoral Fellow) entitled 'Scaling and fractal processes and methods in nature.' This class also built on concepts used in the biocomplexity project. The class abstract follows: Fractal processes are a stronghold in the explanation of natural mechanisms taking place at all scale from molecules to continents. New approaches to some biological mechanisms taking place in multidimensional, aggregated systems are currently setting fractal theory as the main framework under which to study scaling processes, from molecular kinetics to allometric relationships and food-webs. Thus, the course aimed to address different disciplinary topics under a common
approach. Basic properties of fractal patterns and the methods used to measure them were reviewed. Students presented some of their project work in class, related their research experiences, and reported if they will be able to apply some of the techniques for finding fractal patterns or inferring scaling properties in their systems.

In addition, another course called Biological-physical Interactions in Aquatic Ecosystems emphasized system dynamics in water environments. One of the instructors, Todd Cowen, is a PI on this project. The purpose of the class was to enable in-depth examination and review of the biological-physical interactions in freshwater ecosystems. The course allowed examination of those interactions and provided in-sight to the importance of physical and biological interactions in structuring and governing freshwater communities. An outcome of the course was the preparation of a review paper on this integrative topic.

Project Design Features for Education

This project was designed to be highly conducive to graduate student research progress, broad-based experiences, and in-depth research specialization. The cumulative budget was largely composed of two main costs: a shared set of project assistants, and seven funded graduate student positions. Little funding was committed to faculty salary (exceptions were required for two atypical cases), conference travel, and other common large grant extras. The shared study assistants were composed of one full-time experienced research coordinator, one full year technician, a computer-GIS-Web specialist, and two summer positions for most of the course of the project. The intent was to provide full time assistance to execute the many field and computer tasks needed to support the project. We agreed to have these positions assist the subcontract groups at Syracuse University and SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. The importance of this plan for education is that we did NOT use graduate students as research labor. Instead, students had the time to plan research activities and execute them with the help of a common study team. While we expected most of these students to engage in field work and data collection, they were not required to carry the burden of all project data collection needs. Instead they planed targeted and unique research, and gained from working closely with the investigators and assistants.

Other Educational Efforts

Aside from graduate students, we budgeted annual funds for two university undergraduate interns. These students worked with the shared field and computer study assistants and thereby were exposed to a wide array of field and computer techniques, methods, and skills that encompassed the range of disciplines involved in this project. Aside from students, the project is linked to a Policy and Management Advisory Panel. This group provided a direct connection to the organizations currently focused on Great Lakes water level management. This group was important in connecting the project and its lead staff and professors to management agencies that benefited from findings and data. By this we were able to make significant contributions to environmental policy and management with our basic science project. Interaction and collaboration with management and conservation organizations also provided a popular and important educational asset because many students wanted these experiences and sought out opportunities for engagement.

This project was successful in giving a foreign post-doctoral fellow the training needed to successfully develop a Center for Environmental Physics in Spain. The project also was responsible for giving another Spanish post-doctoral fellow the experience needed to obtain a tenure track position at the University of Granada.

Wetland research has been regularly incorporated into the Freshwater Wetland Ecosystems class taught eachspring at SUNY ESF, specifically in terms of: (1) water level regulation effects on freshwater marshes; (2) peat development and what peat layers tell us about past wetland communities and drivers of successional change; and, (3) nitrogen fixers in wetlands.