MBL Students to Present Results of Local Research

The public is invited to attend a symposium featuring the research results of 23 students who have spent the last 10 weeks participating in the ’s Semester in Environmental Science (SES) program.

The symposium will be held from 8:30am-4pm on Friday, December 16 in the MBL’s Speck Auditorium, 10 MBL Street, Woods Hole and will feature 15-minute presentations of research projects that range from a survey of Falmouth homeowners' lawns to study the effects of fertilizer, to a project that involves extracting cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) in the laboratory to test its ability to capture nitrogen. 

Now in its fifteenth year, the SES program is designed to immerse undergraduate science students in an intensive semester of hands-on ecological science using a curriculum that approaches environmental science from an ecosystems perspective. It is sponsored by the MBL’s Ecosystems Center. Students conduct research in local sites on Cape Cod such as freshwater ponds, brackish estuaries, and a forest irrigated with wastewater effluent from our municipal sewage treatment plant, but the problems addressed during the semester are by no means local; they include impacts of land use change, disruption of the global nitrogen cycle, climate change, fossil fuel emissions and carbon cycling, deforestation and over exploitation of fisheries. 

In addition to taking courses in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems science, the students have participated in a science-writing seminar designed to illustrate how the results of scientific investigations can be transmitted to the public. For a full listing of presentations, visit the Ecosystems Center website.