Environmental Geoscience Lab

2 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

STIA 228/BIOL 184 Environmental Geoscience Lab Environment Geoscience Lab, STIA 228/BIOL 184, is a stand-alone lab course developed to accompany STIA 227/BIOL 183, Environmental Geoscience. Through a series of hands-on experiments, we’ll develop the underlying analytic and quantitative skills needed to identify environmental problems, design approaches to study these problems, rigorously analyze experimental results, and reach independent conclusions. In the process, we’ll gain an understanding of how to conduct environmental sampling and discover the joys of field research. We’ll analyze pollutants in our local watershed, explore phenomena like fluid convection, acquire new skills, like scanning electron microscopy and next generation DNA sequencing, and generate our own biofuels and wet scrubbers. We’ll learn proper lab techniques as well as quantitative methods of data analysis (including some basic statistics and data visualization). We’ll also hone our ability to effectively communicate experimental findings to the scientific community, governmental agencies, non-governmental environmental organizations, and the public. Enrollment Instructions There are no prerequisites, but permission of the instructor is required to enroll in STIA 228/BIOL 184, as is co-enrollment in STIA 227/BIOL 183, Environmental Geoscience. Students with seats will be informed about their enrollment status shortly after the close of the preregistration period (seats will be allocated based strictly on class year, major/minor, and whether a student has attempted to enroll in STIA 228/BIOL 184 previously) .