Four UGA professors have received a $447,000 grant from NASA that will offer undergraduate students a year-long combination of classroom and field classes studying the effects of climate change on birds.
NASA’s three-year global climate change education teaching and research grant funds instruction activities scheduled to begin with fall 2010 classes. The grant will fund fall, spring and summer courses that will teach students about global climate change models, research methods and designing field experiments. The students will use NASA data, models, spatial analysis, statistics and field methods while studying the effects of climate change on birds and bird migration.
Warnell School professors Jeffrey Hepinstall-Cymerman, Robert Cooper and Michael Conroy are lead investigators on the grant, which also includes Marshall Shepherd, a professor in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. As part of the grant, the team will install ground sensors at Whitehall Forest, a research forest located off campus and managed by Warnell, and at the Coweeta Long Term Ecological Research station to allow students to compare ground measurements with measurements made with NASA satellites.
