ENVS 270 Terrestrial Ecosystem Analysis

This courses is taught at the Semester in Environmental Sciences (SES) Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The course covers terrestrial ecosystems from the point of view of biogeochemistry and important ecological processes.  In the field and laboratory students will start out in the first eight weeks of the core courses with an intensive study focused mainly on local ecosystems. Terrestrial fieldwork is conducted in grassland, forest and suburban habitats in the Crane Wildlife Management Area in Mashpee and other sites in Falmouth. The sites are chosen to represent a disturbance chronosequence and allow comparison of ecosystems processes, such as primary production and nitrogen mineralization, and properties such as standing stock, plant diversity and soil carbon and nitrogen content across the disturbance gradient. Requires separate application process.