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1. Climate changes of the past: Engaging in evidence-based argumentation

   Governor, D. ; Strickland, K. ; Bailey, J. M. ( October 2020 , The Earth scientist)

   Our Earth’s climate is dynamic and ever changing. The fossil record provides evidence of early organisms and information about climate changes of the past. By exploring evidence of variations in the fossil record, students can better understand the issues related to climate change today. In the build-a-MEL activity described here, students are asked to evaluate different lines of evidence and make a judgement about how they connect to alternative explanatory models. Critical thinking skills are enhanced while students engage in a process of negotiation about the evidence, and students are hopefully better prepared to address the complexity of issues related to our current climate change situation from studying fossil evidence.
2. Survey Development to Measure the Gap Between Student Awareness, Literacy and Action to Address Human Caused Climate Change

   Shealy, Tripp ; Godwin, Allison ; Gardner, Haley ( June 2017 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals state climate change could irreversibly affect future generations and is one of the most urgent issues facing society. To date, most education research on climate change examines middle and high school students’ knowledge without considering the link between understanding and interest to address such issues in their career. In research on students’ attitudes about sustainability, we found that half of first-year college engineering students, in our nationally representative sample of all college students at 4-year institutions (n = 937), do not believe climate change is caused by humans. This lack of belief in human-caused climate change is a significant problem in engineering education because our results also indicate engineering students who do not believe in human caused climate change are less likely to want to address climate change in their careers. This dismal finding highlights a need for improving student understanding and attitudes toward climate change in order to produce engineers prepared and interested in solving complex global problems in sustainability. To advance understanding about students’ understanding of climate change and their agency to address the issue, we developed the CLIMATE survey to measure senior undergraduate engineering students’ Climate change literacy, engineering identity, careermore »motivations, and agency through engineering. The survey was designed for students in their final senior design, or capstone course, just prior to entering the workforce. We developed the survey using prior national surveys and newly written questions categorized into six sections: (1) career goals and motivation, (2) college experiences, (3) agency, (4) climate literacy, (5) people and the planet, and (6) demographic information. We conducted focus groups with students to establish face and content validity of the survey. We collected pilot data with 200 engineering students in upper-level engineering courses to provide validity evidence for the use of these survey items to measure students and track changes across the undergraduate curriculum for our future work. In this paper, we narrate the development of the survey supported by literature and outline the next step for further validation and distribution on a national scale. Our intent is to receive feedback and input about the questions being asked and the CLIMATE instrument. Our objective is to share the nationally representative non-identifiable responses (the estimated goal is 4,000 responses) openly with education researchers interested in students understanding about climate change, their engineering identity, career motivations, and agency through engineering. Ultimately, we want this research to become a catalyst for teaching about topics related to climate change in engineering and its implications for sustainability.« less
3. Survey Development to Measure the Gap Between Student Awareness, Literacy and Action to Address Human Caused Climate Change

   Shealy, T. ; Godwin, A ; Gardner, H. ( June 2017 , ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   The United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals state climate change could irreversibly affect future generations and is one of the most urgent issues facing society. To date, most education research on climate change examines middle and high school students’ knowledge without considering the link between understanding and interest to address such issues in their career. In research on students’ attitudes about sustainability, we found that half of first-year college engineering students, in our nationally representative sample of all college students at 4-year institutions (n = 937), do not believe climate change is caused by humans. This lack of belief in human-caused climate change is a significant problem in engineering education because our results also indicate engineering students who do not believe in human caused climate change are less likely to want to address climate change in their careers. This dismal finding highlights a need for improving student understanding and attitudes toward climate change in order to produce engineers prepared and interested in solving complex global problems in sustainability. To advance understanding about students’ understanding of climate change and their agency to address the issue, we developed the CLIMATE survey to measure senior undergraduate engineering students’ Climate change literacy, engineering identity, careermore »motivations, and agency through engineering. The survey was designed for students in their final senior design, or capstone course, just prior to entering the workforce. We developed the survey using prior national surveys and newly written questions categorized into six sections: (1) career goals and motivation, (2) college experiences, (3) agency, (4) climate literacy, (5) people and the planet, and (6) demographic information. We conducted focus groups with students to establish face and content validity of the survey. We collected pilot data with 200 engineering students in upper-level engineering courses to provide validity evidence for the use of these survey items to measure students and track changes across the undergraduate curriculum for our future work. In this paper, we narrate the development of the survey supported by literature and outline the next step for further validation and distribution on a national scale. Our intent is to receive feedback and input about the questions being asked and the CLIMATE instrument. Our objective is to share the nationally representative non-identifiable responses (the estimated goal is 4,000 responses) openly with education researchers interested in students understanding about climate change, their engineering identity, career motivations, and agency through engineering. Ultimately, we want this research to become a catalyst for teaching about topics related to climate change in engineering and its implications for sustainability.« less
4. First Record of Fungal Diversity in the Tropical and Warm-Temperate Middle Miocene Climate Optimum Forests of Eurasia

   https://doi.org/10.3389/ffgc.2021.768405  

   Romero, Ingrid C. ; Nuñez Otaño, Noelia B. ; Gibson, Martha E. ; Spears, Tyler M. ; Fairchild, C. Jolene ; Tarlton, Laikin ; Jones, Savannah ; Belkin, Harvey E. ; Warny, Sophie ; Pound, Matthew J. ; et al ( December 2021 , Frontiers in Forests and Global Change)

   The middle Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO) was the warmest interval of the last 23 million years and is one of the best analogs for proposed future climate change scenarios. Fungi play a key role in the terrestrial carbon cycle as dominant decomposers of plant debris, and through their interactions with plants and other organisms as symbionts, parasites, and endobionts. Thus, their study in the fossil record, especially during the MMCO, is essential to better understand biodiversity changes and terrestrial carbon cycle dynamics in past analogous environments, as well as to model future ecological and climatic scenarios. The fossil record also offers a unique long-term, large-scale dataset to evaluate fungal assemblage dynamics across long temporal and spatial scales, providing a better understanding of how ecological factors influenced assemblage development through time. In this study, we assessed the fungal diversity and community composition recorded in two geological sections from the middle Miocene from the coal mines of Thailand and Slovakia. We used presence-absence data to quantify the fungal diversity of each locality. Spores and other fungal remains were identified to modern taxa whenever possible; laboratory codes and fossil names were used when this correlation was not possible. This study represents the firstmore »of its kind for Thailand, and it expands existing work from Slovakia. Our results indicate a total of 281 morphotaxa. This work will allow us to use modern ecological data to make inferences about ecosystem characteristics and community dynamics for the studied regions. It opens new horizons for the study of past fungal diversity based on modern fungal ecological analyses. It also sheds light on how global variations in fungal species richness and community composition were affected by different climatic conditions and under rapid increases of temperature in the past to make inferences for the near climatic future.« less
5. Progressive aridification in East Africa over the last half million years and implications for human evolution

   https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801357115  

   Owen, R. Bernhart ; Muiruri, Veronica M. ; Lowenstein, Tim K. ; Renaut, Robin W. ; Rabideaux, Nathan ; Luo, Shangde ; Deino, Alan L. ; Sier, Mark J. ; Dupont-Nivet, Guillaume ; McNulty, Emma P. ; et al ( October 2018 , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

   Evidence for Quaternary climate change in East Africa has been derived from outcrops on land and lake cores and from marine dust, leaf wax, and pollen records. These data have previously been used to evaluate the impact of climate change on hominin evolution, but correlations have proved to be difficult, given poor data continuity and the great distances between marine cores and terrestrial basins where fossil evidence is located. Here, we present continental coring evidence for progressive aridification since about 575 thousand years before present (ka), based on Lake Magadi (Kenya) sediments. This long-term drying trend was interrupted by many wet–dry cycles, with the greatest variability developing during times of high eccentricity-modulated precession. Intense aridification apparent in the Magadi record took place between 525 and 400 ka, with relatively persistent arid conditions after 350 ka and through to the present. Arid conditions in the Magadi Basin coincide with the Mid-Brunhes Event and overlap with mammalian extinctions in the South Kenya Rift between 500 and 400 ka. The 525 to 400 ka arid phase developed in the South Kenya Rift between the period when the last Acheulean tools are reported (at about 500 ka) and before the appearance of Middle Stonemore »Age artifacts (by about 320 ka). Our data suggest that increasing Middle- to Late-Pleistocene aridification and environmental variability may have been drivers in the physical and cultural evolution ofHomo sapiensin East Africa.

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