The more we look, the more we see. This is what attracted me to EBIO in the first place – wheresoever we study we find more species, more interactions, more consequences. Every class I've taken at CU has reinforced the magnitude of this phenomenon; I can't help but believe that the limits of evolution and ecology go further and matter more than we believe even now.
My honors thesis tries to clarify some of these limits. I'm conducting a systematic literature review of ecosystem modeling in education, exploring how ecological comparisons have been used to understand learning, teaching, and administration. The fundamentals of evolution and ecology seem to pervade education – concepts evolve, institutions work to populate niches. By exploring which of these parallels have validity and value, I'm hoping to expand the domain of study available to ecologists while reducing the misuse of ecosystem modeling where it's inappropriate.
If ecologists can better understand where we are and what parts of our field are growing, we can better judge what to study and how to study it.
