Nature in the Neighborhood

The Nature in the Neighborhood (NITN) project grew out of the needs expressed by PSU students who desired avenues of involvement in local environmental issues, and the needs of local resource management agencies (THPRD, METRO, Portland Parks) that lacked resources to develop inventories and surveys of natural resources in the Portland area. This summer this capstone has be redesigned to serve majors in Biology and ESR. The course content and goals will assume students have an adequate background in ecology. In collaboration with METRO, we will focus our efforts with Metro to evaluate factors promoting the spread of invasive false brome, and its impact on native plant communities. We will be developing research questions, designing data collection protocols, contributing to ongoing site monitoring, collecting and analyzing data, and writing final reports on our findings. To accomplish the broader goals of this project we will be forming multiple working groups, the number of which will depend to some degree on the interests and goals of participants in this Capstone.