New England Institute for Landscape Ecology NEILE link

The New England Institute for Landscape Ecology (NEILE) is a nonprofit organization co-founded by Dr. Benjamin Steele and me in 1993. He is vice president and I am president. Since its inception, NEILE has had an uninterrupted sequence of years of funded ecological research. The funding has come from the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and Legacy. In addition, IK have recently collaborated with Drs. Celia Chen and David Peart of Dartmouth College to offer environmental education programs to high schoolers and middle and high school teachers. This collaboration has been funded through the Wellborn Ecology Fund branch of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundations.

The funded research is described in other places on my web site. The earlier work of NEILE with the Army Corps involved a waterfowl die-off on a military base in AK due to white phosphorus poisoning. Since then, the focus of NEILE’s research has shifted to the tropics (see Northerrn Waterthrush and mangroves).

The environmental education took place at my home, also the address of NEILE, the last two summers. For each group, we scheduled a three-day ecology intensive in which participants slept in tents and communally prepared and ate meals outdoors (weather permitting). Three areas of focus included aquatic ecology, plant ecology, and animal ecology. Activities included 1) sampling ponds and comparing data on food webs from a pond with fish and a pond without fish, 2) conducting measurements of early succession forest plots and tree cores to infer patterns relating to plant growth and community dynamics, 3) taking early AM bird walks to identify bird species by sight and sound, and 4) conducting a small mammal trapping experiment to examine the potential importance of forest habitat features. Data were analyzed using statistical software on laptop computers. Participants presented findings and roundly discussed the patterns in the data, especially for the aquatic food web results.

	Participants and instructors of the Summer 2002 Field Ecology Intensive funded by Wellborn Ecology Fund. Participants were from from five different school districts in Vermont and New Hampshire.
Celia Chen provides instruction to teachers during the sub-sampling of aquatic macroinvertebrate samples from two local ponds. We characterized the food webs of both ponds and analyzed the data for differences between the pond with fish compared to the one without fish. Clear and logical differences were observed.