Search for: All records

While many instructors have reservations against Wikipedia use in academic settings, editing Wikipedia teaches students valuable writing, editing, and critical thinking skills. Wikipedia assignments align with the community of inquiry framework, which focuses on the elements needed for a successful online learning experience. We report on a faculty mentoring network, created by WikiProject Limnology and Oceanography, which helped 14 instructors with little to no prior experience implement a Wikipedia assignment in their classes. We found that Wikipedia assignments increase students’ motivation to produce high quality work and enhance their awareness of reliable scientific sources. Wikipedia assignments can be comparable to other writing assignments in length and complexity, but have a far wider audience than a traditional research paper. Participants in our mentoring network reported challenges with implementing this new type of assignment, and here, we share resources and solutions to those reported barriers.

Abstract. Waters impounded behind dams (i.e., reservoirs) areimportant sources of greenhouses gases (GHGs), especially methane (CH4), butemission estimates are not well constrained due to high spatial and temporalvariability, limitations in monitoring methods to characterize hot spot andhot moment emissions, and the limited number of studies that investigatediurnal, seasonal, and interannual patterns in emissions. In this study, weinvestigate the temporal patterns and biophysical drivers of CH4emissions from Acton Lake, a small eutrophic reservoir, using a combinationof methods: eddy covariance monitoring, continuous warm-season ebullitionmeasurements, spatial emission surveys, and measurements of key drivers ofCH4 production and emission. We used an artificial neural network togap fill the eddy covariance time series and to explore the relativeimportance of biophysical drivers on the interannual timescale. We combinedspatial and temporal monitoring information to estimate annualwhole-reservoir emissions. Acton Lake had cumulative areal emission rates of45.6 ± 8.3 and 51.4 ± 4.3 g CH4 m−2 in 2017 and 2018,respectively, or 109 ± 14 and 123 ± 10 Mg CH4 in 2017 and2018 across the whole 2.4 km2 area of the lake. The main differencebetween years was a period of elevated emissions lasting less than 2 weeksin the spring of 2018, which contributed 17 % of the annual emissions inthe shallow region of the reservoir. The spring burst coincided with aphytoplankton bloom, which was likely drivenmore »by favorable precipitation andtemperature conditions in 2018 compared to 2017. Combining spatiallyextensive measurements with temporally continuous monitoring enabled us toquantify aspects of the spatial and temporal variability in CH4emission. We found that the relationships between CH4 emissions andsediment temperature depended on location within the reservoir, and we observed a clearspatiotemporal offset in maximum CH4 emissions as a function ofreservoir depth. These findings suggest a strong spatial pattern in CH4biogeochemistry within this relatively small (2.4 km2) reservoir. Inaddressing the need for a better understanding of GHG emissions fromreservoirs, there is a trade-off in intensive measurements of one water bodyvs. short-term and/or spatially limited measurements in many waterbodies. The insights from multi-year, continuous, spatially extensivestudies like this one can be used to inform both the study design andemission upscaling from spatially or temporally limited results,specifically the importance of trophic status and intra-reservoirvariability in assumptions about upscaling CH4 emissions.« less