Task #1 – Analysis of a Research Study (Expert Groups)

With your expert group (classmates who read the same paper you read to prepare for this discussion), complete the following:

• Discuss the main take-home points from the study
• Identify a second important take-home point
• Discusses a graph and how the selected graph helps explain the findings of the assigned article
  • If everyone in the group looked at the same graph for homework, spend some time collectively talking through the other graphs in your paper. Be prepared to discuss all of them once we return to home groups.
• Finally, each student discusses a statistic that she or he chose form the article and determines its contribution to the article
  • Again, make sure to discuss more than one statistical analysis from the paper

Task #2 – Sharing Expertise (Home Groups)

You will now be assigned to a “home” group, which will have at least one student from each of the expert groups. As an expert on your particular topic, you are now tasked with explaining everything you discussed with the other members of your “home” group. Remember, the members in your home group did not read the paper you did and while they are experts in other topics, they don’t know yours.

You will be given approximately 5 minutes each to explain:

• The primary and secondary take home points of the paper
• Your chosen graph from the paper
• Your chosen statistic from the paper and why it is important for the story

Your explanation should take about 5 minutes, and then spend another 5 minutes answering the questions of your other group members.

While someone else in your group is explaining the details of the paper they read, pay close attention. During their presentation, you should develop a unique question to ask them. After the explanations, group members will take turns asking the questions they devised, and the “expert” will take the time to answer them. Create a document to keep track of your own questions, and those asked by the other group members. You will also want to keep track of the answers provided by the expert. (If you are the expert for the given topic, you are not required to ask a question of yourself; just write “Expert” next to the heading below.)

Questions for the Experts:

• Range Shifts:
• Phenology:
• Community Shifts:
• Biodiversity:

Once all members have taught the group about the paper they read, we will return to the main classroom and discuss our findings together.

Task 3 – Vernal Pool Predictions (Home Groups)

So far you have seen that there are many different ways that plants can and will respond to climate change globally, including changes in bud bursts, range shifts, community composition, etc. Understanding these responses is a very hot topic in the scientific literature. While every ecosystem has its own set of concerns and constraints our focus now will be on how climate change can impact vernal pool plant species.

In addition to what we learned in class on Monday about vernal pools, I am providing a paper by Collinge and Ray (2009), in which they describe an experiment to investigate how these plant communities may be organized. For this task build off our previous class activities and the Collinge and Ray paper and come up with 3–4 predictions on how vernal pool plants may respond to climate change.