Abstract Detail

Conference Wide

Krakos, Kyra Neipp [1], Soltis, Pamela [2], Koptur, Suzanne [3].

Teaching Climate Change in a Botanical Context.

Understanding climate change and its impacts is a crucial scientific tenet of biological fields broadly, and botany specifically. Botany can provide a rich framework for educating on the impacts of climate change for current and future generations. One of the goals of the teaching section is to provide consistent pedagogy and education resources to all members of the society. With the multi-faceted demands on the time of botanical researchers, it can be helpful to have detailed modules modeled and provided for educators. The goal of this workshop is to provide some practical examples of teaching climate change in a botanical context.
In this workshop, we will share the teaching materials developed on this topic, allowing participants to easily develop courses at their home institutions. During the workshop, participants will move between multiple stations where specific activities and learning modules centered on climate change will be demonstrated. The materials and resources for each of the modules will be provided. For example, one of the learning stations will focus on flowering phenology and pollination changes resulting from climate change. Over evolutionary time, the blooming times of plants have changed little, but herbarium and other phenological records (project budburst, etc.) have shown that many species are blooming earlier than in previous decades, and with more variability in the day of first blooms and peak flowering. Most flowering plants depend on animal pollinators, and if the presence of the appropriate visitor does not correspond to when the plants are flowering, the effort they put into reproduction may be wasted. We will consider some examples: agaves and bats in Mexico, Malpighiaceae and oil-collecting bees in subtropical Florida, and spring flowers in the Great Lakes region, and provide guidance to finding local examples and data to use in making relevant activities. A second learning station will look at predicting plant responses to climate change. Herbarium specimens, coupled with computational modeling, can be valuable tools for inferring how plants have responded to a changing climate and for predicting how they may respond in the future. We will present a series of options, ranging from a single lab module to an entire Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE), emphasizing how online herbarium resources (especially iDigBio and GBIF) can be repurposed for studying and learning about climate change. The module or course can be developed around a local flora or region to engage students at any level with their immediate environment. We will illustrate how ecological niche modeling, using locality information obtained from online herbarium specimen records, can be used to describe the current niche of a species, where that niche occurs in geographic space today, and where that niche may occur in the future, to predict if suitable habitat for a species may shift in the future under various scenarios of climate change. The workshop will conclude with a round-table discussion in which instructors can share ideas and discuss ways to further engage students with the material.

1 - Maryville University, Biology, 650 Maryville University, St Louis, MO, 63141, United States
2 - University Of Florida, Florida Museum Of Natural History, Gainesville, FL, 32611.0, United States
3 - Florida International University, Department Of Biological Sciences, 11200 SW 8th St., Miami, FL, 33199, United States

Keywords:
none specified

Presentation Type: Workshop
Number: W14001
Abstract ID:18
Candidate for Awards:None