Environmental Science Ideas

ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE IDEAS

Construct: Calories or Amount of Protein Consumed per Day

Compare: Males vs. Females or Athletes vs. non – athletes (may need to account for activity level of all participants). Alternatively, you can compare the calories vs. protein within one group (you know, what food they are primarily eating).

Procedure: Have participants keep track of the food they eat during one or more days. Then, they should estimate the number of calories and/or the amount of protein consumed. This information can be obtained from food packages or web sites that have calorie charts.

Some interesting follow – up or alternative study ideas: The participants can compare the number of calories or amount of protein to the recommended amounts (I think currently, 2300 – 2900 cal. for men, 1900 – 2200 cal. for women). Recommended protein is based on weight and can be determined by converting weight in pounds to weight in kilograms (divide wt. in lbs by 2.2lb/kg) and then multiplying your weight in kg by 0.8 g protein/kg. Then, what I find eye – opening for students (though I’m not sure how you incorporate this into the stats project) is to compare their calorie/protein consumption to that of other countries, especially poor countries. This information can also be found online. Students see that, wow, we really are a gluttonous society.

Construct: Trash generation

Compare: Residents vs. commuters, ?

Procedure: Participants will collect the trash they produce each day for one week, using a different bag for each day. Participants should rinse out food containers and NOT include any discarded food or items that pose a health risk! The amount of garbage can be weighed each day on a bathroom scale by having the participant first weight himself, then himself plus the bag of garbage and subtract to get the garbage weight. At the end of the week, the total weight can be added up and divided by 7 to get the average amount per day.

Extensions: Sort trash by type – paper and paperboard, plastics, glass, metals, wood, and other and determine totals for each category. That can lead to some questions about recycling and maybe even a survey on attitudes about and participation in recycling.

Construct: Lichens as indicators of air quality. This is not a survey – based research idea.

Compare: Two areas (say, the national forest outside Dahlonega and a wooded area near Atlanta) that likely differ in air quality.

Procedure: The students conducting this study will first need to learn a bit about lichens (biology majors should know this). Lichens are symbionts of algae and fungi and are very sensitive to air pollution. Students can find them growing on trees, exposed rocky areas and old tombstones. The students will examine the two areas for types of lichens (I can give you a handout for this or they can find something online). They will record the lichen types and also the area of lichen growth (using a grid on a transparency is easiest to get an accurate area measure). Using the lichen types and area of lichen growth, they can estimate air quality (again, I have a handout or they can find info online).

Construct: Environmental Risk Assessment

Compare: Parents vs. non – parents (will age confound results?), males vs. females

Procedure: Students conducting the research should come up with a list of risks. These should include environmental risks such as nuclear power, global warming, pesticides, burning fossil fuels, etc. and also more “familiar” risks like smoking, handguns, flying, alcoholic beverages and so on. Participants then rate risks on two scales (observable vs. non – observable, observable meaning the effect of the risk is immediate obvious or known to science, and controllable vs. non – controllable, controllable meaning that the person has some control over this risk). Also have the participants rank the risks from 1 – 12 with 1 being the greatest risk and 12 being the least.

Interesting extensions: What I think makes this interesting is to see how the rankings made by a person correspond to their ratings on the two scales. I guess there might be some additional studies that can be derived from this information (perhaps some way to compare the ranking a person gave a risk to their rating on one or both scales?). Also, you can compare the ranks given by participants to those of “experts”, which can be found online.

Construct: Survey of environmental attitudes

Compare: I don’t know if this is feasible, given the project timeline, but I think it might be interesting to survey students taking Environmental Science (Biology 1260) at the very beginning and the very end of the semester to see if their attitudes have changed after taking the course. Otherwise, maybe you can compare science majors vs. non – majors or students who have taken Biol 1260 vs. those who have not.

Procedure: We rarely do survey – based research in biology, so I’ll need some help here. Attached is a survey adapted from a Gallop Poll that I’ve used in past classes.

Extensions: Built into the Gallop survey are questions about environmental attitudes as well as actions. A study could be done to address this comparison in more detail.

Construct: Fitness and resting heart rate

Compare: Athletes vs. non – athletes, males vs. females, nursing vs. non – nursing majors, individuals before and after caffeine consumption.

Procedure: Measure participant’s resting heart rate before physical exertion. Have participant run up 4 flights of stairs in HNS (or whatever exertion researchers select) and then measure heart rate immediately after and then 2 minutes after to measure recovery. Obviously I need someone more medical to help with this part.