Professor & Watershed ecologist St. Joseph River Basin Commission South Bend, Indiana, United States
Many college students have not experienced the local ecology of campus or surrounding communities. In this era of unprecedented global change, the need has never been greater to empower students to understand ecology and their impact on the local environment. The watershed concept, which urges us to recognize that we all live upstream and downstream, provides a common landscape in which students can experience human ecology and understand their relationship with the natural world. Place-based watershed science can be adapted to enrich a variety of undergraduate science and humanities courses, giving students authentic learning experiences through participation in field ecology, spatial analysis, data collection, and science communication to the broader public.The goal of this poster is to highlight recent successful applications of the watershed philosophy and human-ecological interactions in environmental science courses taught at Holy Cross College, a small Catholic liberal arts college located in Notre Dame, Indiana within the St. Joseph River Basin of Lake Michigan. Since 2021, a new Environmental Science minor has given students opportunities to take courses in Ecology, Aquatic Ecology, Human Ecology, and Environmental Sociology. Throughout each of these courses, place-based approaches have challenged students to observe their surroundings and begin the practice of asking questions and further refining their inquiries into hypotheses.Place-based learning also presents an opportunity for students to contribute to long-term datasets on habitat and water quality of understudied waterways in local watersheds. This is valuable because a critical component of effective watershed stewardship is establishing baseline data and performing trend analysis of water quality and habitat attributes. Accordingly, Aquatic Ecology and General Ecology focused on students’ ownership of the data collection process and challenged students to develop research questions through the analysis of their findings and comparisons with historic data. Students in Human Ecology and Environmental Sociology, through weekly visits to local sites and journaling that documented their observations of place, contributed knowledge on local natural history.Since these courses have been offered, enrolled students have reported a renewed sense of place and connection to their surrounding environment and a desire to learn more about ecology. The data collected by students in these courses has also contributed new knowledge on the status of the health of key tributaries within the Basin. This paper concludes with discussion of how place-based learning, human ecology, and watershed science can be integrated to develop robust undergraduate research experiences that contribute high-quality ecological data.
