New summer course immerses students in biodiversity

By Rachel Stowe Master '91

Field-intensive instruction at the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge is the the focus of a new six-week minicourse called "Biodiversity: Inquiry & Methods."

Worth six hours of credit, the course will train students to identify the biodiversity of an area. It offers practice in describing and inventorying plants, insects, freshwater invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, and it also emphasizes conservation biodiversity, including threats and policies on local and global scales.

At a sprawling 3,600-plus acres, the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge is the largest city-owned nature center in the nation. But as subdivisions sprout up around it, the preserve's ecological communities surely will feel the squeeze. While students are gaining valuable experience evaluating local biodiversity, they also will be compiling data and presenting recommendations at the end of the course.

Tony Burgess, TCU professor of professional practice who is teaching the course, and whose previous experience includes work on Columbia University's Biosphere 2 project, said the class schedule will be intense. "It will be six days a week. And some days if we're studying birds, we'll be up early. And the day we try to spotlight the alligators, we'll be up really late," he said.

The course is supported by a Vision in Action grant, which covers hiring several experts to plan and test the instructional modules, as well as equipment such as snake-handling tongs, portable dissecting microscopes, live traps for small mammals, drawers for insect specimens and poison ivy medicine.

"Monitoring biodiversity in its various aspects takes a lot of time," Burgess said. "The work done by our students in creating baseline information and subsequently recording changes should be very useful both for managing the landscape and teaching people."

As the course ends, a week long trip to the Big Thicket National Preserve near Beaumont will test student skills at examining a new habitat.

"The intent is to make students more aware of the consequences of their lifestyle choices and prepare them for some role in stewardship of this living heritage," Burgess said. "Basically I want students to understand that it¡¦s OK to be a 'naturalist nerd' and to coach them in ways of knowing and celebrating the diversity of living things in ways that other people may value."

For more information, contact Tony Burgess at t.burgess@tcu.edu.