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Thursday, December 10, 2009

Global warming, flying saucers take your pick

University professors in two schools have received a $447,000 grant from NASA that will offer undergraduate students a year-long combination of classroom and field classes studying the effects of climate change on birds.
Aerosol illustrationNASA's three-year global climate change education teaching and research grant funds instruction activities that are scheduled to begin with fall 2010 classes. The grant will fund fall, spring and summer courses that will teach students about global climate change models, research methods and designing field experiments.

The final course in the lecture and lab series-to be held during summer classes-will have students perform their experiments in the field. That field experience will make students more competitive for graduate schools and jobs, said Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman, an assistant professor of landscape ecology in the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Hepinstall-Cymerman said the students will use NASA data, models, spatial analysis, statistics and field methods while studying the effects of climate change on birds and bird migration.

"This training offers a unique opportunity for students to obtain an understanding of the complexities and challenges involved in predicting floral and faunal responses to a changing climate, in addition to exposing them to important field and analytical methods at the cutting edge of applied ecology," he said.
View of the Earth as seen by Apollo 17
Hepinstall-Cymerman and two other professors in the Warnell School, Robert Cooper and Michael Conroy, are lead investigators on the grant, which also includes Marshall Shepherd, a professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.


As part of the grant, the team will install ground sensors at Whitehall Forest, a research forest located off campus and managed by Warnell, and at the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research station to allow students to compare ground measurements with measurements made with NASA satellites. This will allow students to see how the satellite images covering large areas compare to detailed information gathered on the ground, Conroy explained. "This is an excellent example of how you use that technology to teach," he said.

The effect of climate change on birds is sometimes overlooked when the controversial subject is debated, but Conroy notes that if springs continue to get warmer, then it affects when the primary food source for birds-insects-emerge. If birds don't adjust to that change, he said, newly-hatched birds won't have enough food.

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