FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Jan. 20, 2015
COLLEGE STUDENTS ENGAGE
IN LONG-TERM RESEARCH PROJECTS AT ROOKERY BAY RESERVE
~Ongoing service-learning project provides students with experience in experimental design~
Hiram College students conducting a vegetation transect survey.
NAPLES – The Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s
Florida Coastal Office provides hands-on learning programs for college students
interested in Florida’s coastal environment. Rookery Bay National Estuarine
Research Reserve has been engaging students in science for more than 35 years. Through
a long-term partnership with Hiram College in northeast Ohio, students in an
intensive 18-day Marine Ecology course have the opportunity to learn about
Florida’s coastal environment by studying it firsthand.
Professor
Dennis Taylor, Hiram’s "Igniting Streams of Learning in Science" co-director,
established a partnership with Rookery Bay Reserve through an invitation from
Pat O’Donnell, the reserve’s fisheries biologist and Hiram alumnus. Taylor has
been taking his marine biology students to conduct their research at the reserve since 2003.
According to
Taylor, these research projects provide opportunities for students to manage
experimental designs, giving them vital experience navigating the difficulties
associated with gathering robust data sets in the field.
Hiram students
participate in the reserve's long-term shark, bony fish and invertebrate
monitoring surveys, providing experience that cannot be found in textbooks. In
addition, the students have created, and continue to direct, their own ongoing surveys
in the reserve on shorebirds, mangroves and barrier island plants. The students have the opportunity to interact with scientists on many levels, becoming peers
in scientific investigations of public importance.
Rookery Bay
Reserve also benefits from this work. In addition to the extra help with
ongoing monitoring programs, the students provide valuable research data, which
has the potential to highlight issues that may not have been identified by
reserve staff.
“Programs like
this not only help inform us on a wider variety of resource issues, but they
also engage and entice students who may not have considered a career in science
before their experience here,” said Pat O’Donnell, Rookery Bay Reserve's fisheries biologist.
For more information on the Rookery Bay Reserve, click here.
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