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developed for a course entitled "Ecology for Teachers". This distance-ed graduate level course is designed for in-service high school teachers enrolled in a Multidiscplinary Science Masters Degree offered at Texas Tech University. This course is intended to provide teachers with the background necessary to teach ecology content at the high school level. My philosophy is that teachers are the experts in the pedagogies that are most effective for teaching their students. My job in this course is to provide the content knowledge necessary for teachers to be able to create effective learning opportunities for their students.

Giant snakes are eating their way through the Everglades, leaving a drastically changed ecosystem in their wake, a new study shows.

"Ecologists have long argued that everything in the nature is connected, but teasing out these intricate connections is not so easy. In fact, it took research on a remote, unoccupied island for scientists to discover that manta ray abundance was linked to seabirds and thereby native trees."

"Scientists peer into the next decades of environmental change on Planet Earth." Good news stories include ongoing recovery from effects of acid rain in the Adirondacks + new pathways to a sustainable future developed through modeling, ecological forecasting, and mapping responses to environmental change.

A detailed overview of the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and the ecological and economic impacts.

"As part of the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, chemical dispersants are being utilized on the ocean surface and, for the first time, underwater. Dispersants work like dishwashing detergent - they break up oil into droplets, enabling it to mix more easily with the surrounding water. This presents a trade-off: Mitigating damage to the shoreline and surface means exposing the seafloor and water column to additional oil. This briefing brings together experts on the effects of dispersants to discuss how they work, the ongoing efforts in the Gulf, the toxicological and ecological trade-offs of their use, and the future of dispersant technologies."

Worldchanging.com founder Alex Steffen argues that reducing humanity's ecological footprint is incredibly vital now, as the western consumer lifestyle spreads to developing countries.

By piecing together a complex ecological puzzle, biologist Willie Smits has found a way to re-grow clearcut rainforest in Borneo, saving local orangutans -- and creating a thrilling blueprint for restoring fragile ecosystems.

"CUGIR is an active online repository in the National Spatial Data Clearinghouse program. CUGIR provides geospatial data and metadata for New York State, with special emphasis on those natural features relevant to agriculture, ecology, natural resources, and human-environment interactions."

An informative summary by the Ecological Society of America

The Russian-English Agricultural Atlas is the world's most comprehensive source of information on the geographic distribution of plant-based agriculture in Russia and neighboring countries. The Atlas contains 1500 maps that illustrate the distribution of 100 crops, 560 wild crop relatives, 640 diseases, pests and weeds, and 200 environmental parameters. Additionally, the Atlas provides detailed biological descriptions, illustrations, metadata and reference lists. Currently, individual maps can be downloaded and viewed using freely available AgroAtlas GIS Utility software, which can also be downloaded at this site.

Examine a tropical montane cloud forest via this immersive video experience. Click on numbered links to access video clips and facts describing each different forest environment. The site includes background information for teachers and standards-aligned lessons for students in grades 6-8 on such topics as water, weather, soils, ecology, and the science processes.

"Don't despair: that's the message of a new paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, which argues that decades of conservation actions at multiple scales have had a positive impact for many of the world's endangered species. "

My class and I loved this! It is funny (and now they will never forget what ecological succession is!)

This is a nice explanation that ties right back to Aldo Leopold's ideas about what good is nature? It's good in and of itself.

The study shows that species that often occur together now are projected to shift in very different ways, resulting in new ecological communities. These novel (or "no-analog") communities may disrupt complex webs of plant and animal interactions, with unanticipated consequences for species and ecosystems.

Political ecologist Susanna Hecht has incurred the wrath of some conservationists by arguing that the notion of the primeval forest is largely a myth and that disturbed forests play a vital ecological function. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, she makes the case for a "new rurality" that places less emphasis on protected forests and more on the areas where people live.