Ecology Methods (Bio 402) is a writing intensive lab course that accompanies the Ecology lecture (Bio 401). These courses tie together the many skills that you have learned during your career here at NCWU and will begin to prepare you for your next career steps.

This course combines hands-on experience with ecology field techniques, analyzing methods critically reading ecology papers, and applying this knowledge by conducting a class experiment, and finally writing a scientific paper based on the class experiment.

While learning to write a scientific paper is a foundational experience for all students of ecologisty, only students who go to graduate school will likely find themselves writing additional papers for peer review and publication.

Equally important are scientific communication writing skills - those are the skills used to translate and summarize knowledge expressed within peer reviewed journals for non-scientist audiences. Students who do not intend to enter graduate school will likely find themselves writing for science communication - summarizing the work of others, and not to express the results of their own experiments.

This WikiEdu project focuses on building those science communication skills - giving students practice finding and evaluating sources, and then summarizing and editing content to communicate that science knowledge to the general public.