Dr. Amy Freestone to give talk about the new Ambler Campus Field Station
Please register to hear a presentation on Friday 10/2 at 2-3pm by Dr. Amy Freestone, Associate Professor, Dept. of Biology, Temple University, and the Director, Ambler Field Station. She will be talking about the Field Station, an important new initiative for the Ambler Campus and I encourage you all to attend to learn more about it.
Below is the Zook link, an announcement about the presentation.
When: Oct 2, 2020 2:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://temple.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0lc-igqTgpEtW5VJnLwiYebw9ltooG1UUO
(use your @temple.edu email to register)
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
The Ambler Campus was designated in 2020 as the Temple Ambler Field Station, a platform for environmental field research and education. The Field Station leverages the 187- acre Ambler Campus and Arboretum as a living laboratory, providing access to a diversity of natural habitats including old growth and secondary forests, meadows, ephemeral streams, and our beautiful designed gardens. The Field Station also provides research and educational support facilities including lab and instructional spaces, offices for visiting scholars, conference spaces, dormitory accommodations, a fully- equipped tech center, library, and field vehicle access.
Research: Our goal is to be a platform for research across disciplines, from STEM fields to the liberal arts. We are developing several research themes at the Field Station, including a global change program that investigates ecological shifts due to climate change and the ecology and management of invasive species. We are also a new member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Forest Global Earth Observatory Network (ForestGEO, https://www.forestgeo.si.edu/), which spans 71 sites across 27 countries. The Ambler Field Station ForestGEO site will provide detailed and publicly available data on forest dynamics, including two 4-hectare spatially-referenced maps of woody plants, in an old growth and a secondary forest at the Field Station, providing a resource for advanced study of ecosystems, geospatial patterns, and more. Standardized protocols across all network sites allow for direct comparison of our forest ecosystems to those across the globe. We welcome the collaboration of Temple faculty and students in these initiatives and the opportunity to support you with your own research agendas.
Education: We are also excited to work with faculty to integrate field trips and modules at the Field Station into their existing courses on Main Campus, or to develop new field courses that are taught fully at Ambler. Field station staff are trained ecologists and can assist with the development or implementation of field components of courses, or support faculty to implement modules of their own design. Our aim is to use the ForestGEO research plots to expand educational field opportunities at Temple, and we encourage faculty to integrate field modules and data from these plots into coursework (e.g., ecology, GIS, statistics, Earth sciences). Field Station staff will be developing publicly available educational materials related to this program. Research internships at the Field Station will also allow students to be involved in ongoing field research and to investigate their own areas of interest. We are also expanding opportunities for public engagement with the Field Station through Citizen Science activities.
Diversity: The Field Station is actively pursuing opportunities to promote diversity in the sciences and welcomes collaborations that contribute to that goal.
Amy L. Freestone, Director