Achievement

We recruited a new cohort of trainees and conducted the second year of the Core Course in Reverse Ecology. This included a field survey in August and a sampling experiment in October done at the Plum Island Estuary Long Term Ecological Research (PIE LTER) site run by colleagues at our partner institution Marine Biological Laboratories (MBL). This included lectures and field trips led by PIE Principal Investigator, Dr. Anne Giblin from MBL, with input from a microbial ecologist (Dr. Zoe Cardon from MBL, co-PI of the IGERT), an evolutionary geneticist (Dr. David Rand from Brown University, IGERT PI), a conservation biologist (Dr. Dov Sax from Brown), a plant systematist (Dr. Erika Edwards from Brown), plus four trainees, three from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and one from Applied Math. The trainees designed a project that required sampling salt marsh plants from Massachusetts to Georgia, which was accomplished with the help of researchers at other NSF LTER sites.