Florida Coastal Everglades in the Classroom

PhD students at FIU are required to teach a lab for two semesters.  So, for the past two semesters I have been a teaching assistant (TA) for Ecology lab and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience.  A typical ecology lab consists of a large majority of pre-professional students (pre -med, -dental, -vet, etc.) who need an upper-level elective.  Translation:  many students are enrolled in Ecology because they have to.  I don't expect my students to change their career paths and become ecologists; I simply want them to understand why ecology is important.  Memorizing terminology and examples, while they have their place, are not as useful in the long-term – it’s the experiences and hands-on activities we remember.   I am an ecologist and all I remember from my undergraduate ecology class is going out to my university’s nature preserve looking at species abundances and distributions.  If a student who is preparing for a career in ecology and research doesn’t remember that she (or he!) learned about Trophic Cascades as a 19 year-old biology major, how can we expect students preparing for a career in medicine to remember similar concepts?

Wildlife Documentaries

The following is a guest post by Richard Kern, a film maker, lecturer, and co-founder of Odyssey Earth.
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I am not a scientist. I like to say I’m a student of life, a naturalist in training. Yet somehow I’ve fallen into a profession where science is the pivot-point of everything I do. Interesting career path for someone who took 8 credits of Shakespeare in college. So what, really, was the point of getting a degree in something called “Literary and Cultural Studies?!”

Birthday checks, hungry bears, and subsidy dynamics in the Everglades on the Oikos blog

Hi all,

Check out my post on the Oikos blog about subsidy regulation in the Everglades!

Click on the link below to read the entire story

Oikos blog full story

Climate Change in Everglades National Park: Sea Level Rise

I did this video, “Climate Change in Everglades National Park: Sea Level Rise”, at the request of my funding source, The George Melendez Wright Climate Change Fellowship. They wanted all the fellows to present a three minute video of their work at the 2013 George Wright Society Conference on Parks, Protected Areas, and Cultural Sites. I took this opportunity to create a video overview of my research and its importance to Everglades National Park and the rare plant communities being impacted by sea level rise. My hopes are to get this information out to a broader audience to engender a better understanding of how conservation research can be used to help protect rare plant species.

-Kristie Wendelberger

The changing biology PhD job market

According to legend, the story of the career of a biology PhD used to go like this: 1) student joins a lab, 2) student spends 4-8 years doing research and honing specific skills in their chosen field, 3) student gets a tenure-track job at a college/university and becomes a professor after 5 more years or so, 4) with essentially a guaranteed job for life, professor gets to do interesting scientific research and live happily ever after. Somewhere along the way another step was added between steps 2 and 3 (step 2.5: the post-doctoral research position). This story, whether actually the norm or not back in the day, is clearly not the story today. And it's freaking a lot of people out.