We partnered with the educators at the Plum Island Ecosystem Long-term Ecological Research site to develop a Data Nugget based on data collected as part of my NSF CAREER grant.

The program is housed on the Data Nugget website (check out their amazing resources) and you can find the relevant files from the links below.

Marsh Makeover Student A

Marsh Makeover Student B

Marsh teacher notes

Grading rubric

We published a paper showing that lineage plays an important role in determining the rhizosphere microbiome in the invasive reed Phragmites australis. You can read more about our scientific findings here.

You can also read a story about the paper here.

The most fun, though, was to translate this paper into a version for the Environmental Science Journal for Teens. Check out their website here, and access the paper here.

Getting young people excited about science and research is one of the best parts of my job.

Grad student Andrea Unzueta Martinez volunteered her time teaching with the Evolution inChanging Seas Workshop for High School Girls, and developed this awesome activity that looks at the oyster microbiome. This activity is designed for high school students and meets the HS-LS2-6 (ecosystems: interactions, energy, dynamics) science standard. You can download the lesson plan here.

You can learn more about the Evolution in Changing Seas Research Coordination Network that supported Andrea's development of this exercise here

Marsh sediments contain an amzazingly diverse array of microbes and one of the main reasons fror that is because of the very complicated redox chemistry found in the sediments. Oxygen at the surface gets rapidly used up and then microbes that can survive when there is no oxugen around can come along and thrive in the marsh below where oxygen penetrates. You can build a demonstration of this using a couple of boxes of cake and some frosting! The blue green frosting represents the oxygenated watercolumn (complete with 'microbe' sprinkles!) and then a layer of white cake and a layer of choclate cake complete the picture. Students can use sterile syringes to take 'sediment cores' through the cake, for a yummy lesson on how oxygen penetration changes with depth.

The lab group worked together to develop a

lesson on the nitrogen cycle for Northeastern's Marine Science Center's summer Coastal Ocean Science Academy.

The lesson plan, which you can find here, goes into all the ins-and-outs of the nitrogen cycle, and then the students get to head outslide and run an obstacle course for the various pathways in the N cycle. Check out the AMAZING drawing of the obstacle course (right) made by grad student Brian Donnelly. What a talented group of N cycle lovers we have!