Environmental Impact Assessment Course Project

A realistic environmental assessment project for upper-level science majors: teaching scientific skills in an engaging context.

This document contains an overview of a semester-long laboratory project designed for upper-level biology majors at Radford University. The project centered around a constructed stormwater remediation wetland on campus. The project had three main components: field investigations to fill data gaps in our understanding of the wetland, toxicological tests based on what organisms and chemicals had been found in the wetland, and a class report synthesizing our new data with existing data from the wetland.

Although the module is tailored to a specific environmental site, the module can be easily adapted to sites of new development, other environmental management practices, or natural sites. Moreover, subsections of the project can be used when an entire semester can’t be devoted to the project; for instance, the toxicological test section could be accomplished in one or two lab periods.

For specific questions or feedback contact Dr. Jeremy M. Wojdak, Assistant Professor of Biology, Radford University, PO Box 6931, Radford, VA 24142, , 540-831-5395.

Contents:

2…. Environmental Impact Assessment Course Project Overview

3…. Field Investigation Reports

4…. Explanation of Metadata and Data protocols for the project

7…. Toxicological Test

9…. Final Report Sub-sections

10… Oral presentations grading rubric

11… Written reports grading rubric

12… Pre-post test content assessment

Biology 392- Pollution Biology / Environmental Toxicology

Environmental Impact Assessment Course Project

As a class we will all work together to assess the impact that a recently constructed stormwater remediation wetland is having on the Radford University campus and surrounding areas. Our plan has three major components:

Assess the existing knowledge regarding:
the site before the wetland was built
the construction of the wetland
the current state of the site.
Determine what new information needs to be collected
perform field investigations to determine the biological status of the site.
perform toxicological tests relevant to the site’s organisms and pollutants.
Synthesize old and new information into a comprehensive report of the wetland’s impact.

Assignments:

Field Investigations

Student groups will work together for several weeks to design, implement, analyze, and report field investigations that will contribute to our understanding of the wetland. Student groups will have 1 lab period to plan their work, 2 to carry it out, 1 to analyze it, and then will report briefly to the class.

Field investigations might be chemical, physical, or biological in nature. Ideally these investigations will complement existing data collected by other courses.

Toxicological Tests

Student groups will work together for several weeks to design, implement, analyze, and report toxicological tests that will contribute to our understanding of the wetland. Student groups will have 1 lab period to plan their work, 2 to carry it out, 1 to analyze it, and then will report briefly to the class.

Toxicological tests will focus on pollutants identified as possible concerns either because of theoretical pollution or evidence from existing chemical data. Tests will also, to the extent possible, use organisms found in the wetland or indicative of wetland organisms pollution tolerance.

Final Report sub-sections

Student groups will work together to synthesize everything that is known about a particular topic for the final report. For instance, one group will probably summarize all of the toxicological data. Another group will synthesize the existing field data. Another might report on the site history and construction of the wetland. You can probably see that to be successful the groups will need open and effective communication with other classmates.

Field Investigation Reports BIOL 392

You will present the results of your field work in two ways – a short oral presentation to the class (Monday October 9th), and in written form (Due anytime during the week of October 9th) which will become a part of the final document we as a class write describing the wetland’s function. The oral presentation is meant mostly to convey the intent and results of your project to the class – this information may influence the toxicological tests that we develop in the next phase of this project, and will certainly be necessary as we as a class synthesize the current state of knowledge of the wetland in the last phase of our project. The written reports will give us a headstart on this last phase.

Oral Presentation

You should prepare an 8-10 minute oral presentation describing your project. A typical talk will outline the overall project, why the information you sought was important (introduction), how you collected your information (methods), what you found (results), and how we can interpret your new information in the light of what we already know about the wetland (discussion). Discussing potential ways to improve your data collection or ways to follow up to collect complementary information might be useful.

You should cover your project in sufficient detail that the listener can easily envision what you did at each step and how they can interpret your results.

Each member of the group should participate in the presentation. You should ABSOLUTELY practice your talk out loud before giving it to the class – the most common mistake student groups make is in timing – going on forever or finishing much too quickly… in a professional setting this can be a deadly error.

Written Report

You should prepare a short description (4-6 pages?) of your project that will share a lot of commonalities with your oral presentation. The organizational structure will likely be very similar (introduction, methods, results, discussion). Particularly helpful in the discussion would be links to other existing data or known problems, concerns, factors in the wetland. In the written report you have a bit more room/time to elaborate in the introduction and discussion sections – what approaches did you consider, what problems did you encounter, what sources of error or bias concern you?

You should turn the written report into me electronically, no later than October 13th.

As appendices to your report you should include raw data (an Excel file) and metadata (Word document) files. Read the attached handout (prepared for instructors involved in the project) on the structure and utility of metadata, and use those guidelines to construct these files. This is absolutely critical for your data to contribute to the growing wetland project. If your data are lost or uninterpretable, you should have not bothered to collect it.

You will have a chance to consider my feedback on your written report, revise it, and turn it in again before a grade is assigned. The second draft is optional, but clearly you grade may improve from considering my feedback.

Need for Metadata and Data Standards

Radford University Stormwater Wetland Project

Successful data sharing is dependent on very clear and accurate communication of not only the actual data collected by different courses, but of the metadata that corresponds to the data. Metadata is the information typically found scribbled in margins of field or lab notebooks – the when, where, how, what, and why that is necessary to understand and interpret the actual data. Metadata typically includes methods used to collect the data, the date/time/location of collection, who owns the rights to the data, units of measurement, degree of precision of measurements, and who should be contacted with questions regarding the study.

Have you ever opened an old Excel file like this:

or worse yet like this:

and tried to figure out the units of measurement, methods used, date and time of collection….. so you could use the data?

If you have, you already know (deep down) why detailed, structured metadata is important. Especially today as nearly all data is stored electronically, the lack of corresponding electronic metadata cripples efforts to share data. The National Science Foundation is in the process of requiring investigators to distribute and share data more freely – there has been a realization that the Foundation’s money will have greater impact if data is shared and reused. High quality data that is well documented can be used many times for different purposes – data without documentation will likely “die” within several years after collection and will benefit only the original investigator. Another way to consider the issue is that proper documentation will increase one’s own scientific contribution and legacy. Moreover, large-scale synthetic questions will likely only be tackled through data sharing because the scope of the questions precludes any individual or group from collecting sufficient data.

To allow students from different courses and disciplines to collaborate via data sharing, I will need to receive high quality data and metadata files. Much of the metadata documentation will already be done in preparing lab handouts (that describe methods, for instance). However, descriptions of projects may need to broadened and free from subject-specific jargon so a general scientific audience can understand why and how the data was collected.

Below are some guidelines to ensure high-quality data that will be useful to the maximum number of students at RU and elsewhere:

1.) You are responsible for part of a much larger project, and if you slack off you are hurting yourselves, classmates, and students in other courses. Your names will be associated with the data you collect so that you can be contacted if questions arise later.

2.) Check for data entry errors, then check for “problem data” using simple descriptive statistics. For example, a quick look at the range of values in a data column might indicate a typing error or a unit of measurement error…. If data is supposed to vary from 0.0 – 50.0 cm and the range of data in that column goes from 0-137 that might indicate a 13.7cm was typed in as 137 or someone measured in mm.

3.) Look over existing files in the database and use the same data names, type, and units for the same kinds of data, where feasible.

e.g., if you measure the concentration of dissolved oxygen in standing water in various locations, and other classes have done the same thing at other times, naming your data columns the same thing and reporting the data in the same units (% saturation or mg/L or ppm) would be really helpful… it makes it unambiguous that these data are comparable and can be usefully merged.

4.) Provide detailed and jargon free descriptions of the methods used in data collection. Specifically include these descriptors:

Time, date (including year), spatial location (see appendix)
Principal investigator (instructor), course, module name
Description of each column in data file
Define the data in each column – e.g., “above-ground plant biomass”, “extractable organic compounds”, “water depth”
Column name, data type (see appendix), precision, units of measurement, if a data column contains codes (treatments, plots, etc.) describe coding system
Describe the actual processes and methods used in data collection
Data permissions – can anyone use the data for any purpose? Should people contact the PI (instructor) before using data?

5.) Please follow the submission guidelines (see appendix) when forwarding your data for inclusion in the database.

6.) Suggestions for improvements to any aspect of this data sharing enterprise are very welcome….

Appendix. Data conventions.

General Guidelines

· Please submit data (except GIS or map files) as Excel files or as tab-delimited text files. Email files to , if files are very large burn them to a CD.

· Data files should be named as such: topic-date-investigator.xls or topic-date-investigator.txt (e.g., waterchemistry-12312005-wojdak.xls)

· Please submit metadata associated with a data file as a similarly named Word document: topic-date-investigator.doc (e.g., waterchemistry-12312005-wojdak.doc)

· Data should be in columns, with the first row being column headers.

o Do not put text comments or notes in columns with data (text comments shouldn’t be in the data file at all, but instead in the metadata).

· Dates should be reported as mm/dd/year.

· Times should be reported as 00:00 to 24:00 (as in 2:30 am = 2:30 and 2:30 pm = 14:30).

Data types

· Unordered or nominal: unordered categories or text (e.g., Male, Female)

· Ordered or ordinal: ordered categories (e.g., low, medium, high)

· Relative or interval: values from a scale with equidistant points (e.g., 12.2 meters)

· Absolute or ratio: measurement scale with a meaningful zero point (e.g., 273 Kelvin)

· Date-Time: (e.g, 2:30 11/30/2002)

IMPORTANT - Spatial Reference for Data Collection

One module in this project is the collaboration between Geography and Ecology courses (and anybody else who would find it valuable) to construct a GIS database and use the power of GIS tools to look for spatial co-variation between the various sets of data we collect. This will only be possible if individual investigators map their data collection efforts. For example, if the Biology 121 class collects plant data, but records no spatial reference for each plot sampled, other students will not be able to look for relationships between chemical, geological, or other biological features of the wetland and the plant data (e.g., students might explore spatial variation in plant community composition in response to spatial variation in water level). C. Manyara will in his classes create a grid of permanent markers in the wetland and a topographical base map of the wetland site. Once this is complete, students who visit the wetland to collect data can record the spatial location of their sampling by identifying what grid cell they are in, and perhaps making some simple distance and direction measurements to the nearest markers. Once the grid is established, we will circulate a set of standard protocols for locating yourself in the wetland. For those collecting data in the wetland in the meantime, you could mark the location of your sampling with semi-permanent markers, and then once the grid is complete you (or you and I) could go back and record the location of those sampling sites.

Toxicological Tests BIOL 392

1) As a class we need to decide what toxicological testing would complement the existing data from the RU stormwater wetland. Clearly it will make sense to focus on chemicals that have been found or are likely to be found in the wetland. Beyond that, however, there are lots of decisions we need to make:

We have enough time/people/resources to conduct 6 experiments. Should we coordinate the projects to “fit together” into a cohesive project? Or should experiments be used to address many separate questions?