How to do collaborative watershed teaching and research at the undergraduate level using web pages and a methods e-manual

Background/Question/Methods

Faculty and students at small private colleges in the Appalachians often have limited access to diverse instrumentation and faculty expertise for independent research.  Through a network of college faculty from a number of colleges, we have developed a program comparable to larger research institutions with diverse research programs. In our Collaboration through Appalachian Watershed Studies (CAWS) project, faculty and students perform on campus and cross-campus large scale research taking advantage of the expertise of their colleagues while providing more diverse research and learning opportunities for students. 

Results/Conclusions

Long-distance collaboration has included field projects involving students from multiple institutions.  Our first collaborative project involved concurrent monitoring of stream biota. Students at each institution concurrently visited their watershed sites and inventoried benthic macro-invertebrates using the same equipment and procedures.  The data was posted on the CAWS website.  Each college team accessed data from all the watersheds online, performed statistical analyses, and made inferences. Subsequent projects have included “Litter Decomposition Rates across Six Southern Appalachian Watersheds” and “Acid Deposition in the Southern Appalachians”.  An easily accessible and online Lab Manual (eManual) is on the web site (http://www.ferrum.edu/caws/) containing laboratory and field exercises, procedures, and archived data in a common format that faculty use in labs and in independent research in Biology, Environmental, Forestry, Chemistry, and Geology.  This eManual has the small watershed approach as its unifying theme. Most data collected by classes performing an online method are entered into the online database and thereby made available to any subsequent classes.  This facilitates comparisons of the six watersheds within the network and increases the usefulness and versatility of the eManual over time.  Numerous other independent research projects by faculty and students at each of the CAWS watershed study sites have been a positive result of this program.  In addition, other faculty at each of the participating schools now use these sites for research.  Over the last years, more Appalachian colleges, faculty, and students have been added as CAWS collaborators as the result of the success of this project.