Teaching Assistant

Ben Paulson 650-5063

Office Hours:

By appointment-schedule with Cindy Gober at 650-3311;

Wednesday: 2:30 - 3:30 pm

and/or after class

Note: Students will be responsible for their transportation to and from the location of the sampling event. If you get lost on the way to a site, call me at my cellular phone number (getting lost is no excuse for missing an event).

Objectives/Course Description:

The major objective of the course is to provide students theoretical and practical information on environmental sampling techniques. This should help ensure consideration of the many variables and special techniques that are needed to plan and carry out sampling activities that will provide representative environmental samples for analysis.

A number of field techniques will be covered for the sampling of soil, air, water, vegetation, and biota. Students will have the opportunity for “hands-on” experience with most of the sampling techniques.

Text:

Site Characterization: Sampling and Analysis. 1997. By HMTRI/Intelecom, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York. The HMTRI writing team consists of: D. Foss, S. Gaines, D. Gere, and J. Plummer

There may be supplemental articles and/or books distributed in class or put on reserves at the library as the semester progresses.

Preparation/Prerequisites:

Graduate standing; basic statistics; or consent of the instructor.

Organization:

The class will be held once a week for three hours. Lectures will not be held every week so you need to make sure to follow the lecture schedule. There will be a lecture to discuss sampling techniques followed by Saturday field sampling events. Class/field participation is essential for successful completion of the course.

Grading:

Homework 40%

Presentation 10%

Paper 15%

Exam 15%

Group Project/Assessment 20%

Computing/Software:

Data presentation is critical when discussing contaminants and contaminant distributions. There will be several assignments that will require you to use and evaluate a variety of computer programs. Using manuals, help functions, and your colleagues you will learn how to use the software. Some of the programs that are available are: ArcView, Excel, Origin, Quatro Pro, and Sigma Plot.

Attendance:

As there are only six lectures and four sampling events, attendance is essential for success in this class. If you have a University approved reason for missing a sampling event, there will be ONE make-up date as determined by the instructor (you must discuss your absence prior to the sampling event). Failure to complete all four sampling events will result in a 10% deduction of your total grade (per event). Unless arrangements are made with the instructor prior to the due date, late assignments (homework, papers, exams, etc.) will be marked down 10% a day beginning at the end of the class period in which it was due. Assignments more than a week late will not be accepted.

Policy Statement: Academic Misconduct by Students

Faculty members retain their traditional authority to take disciplinary action in the event of academic misconduct. Acts of academic misconduct for which students are subject to sanctions include, without limitation, plagiarism, cheating, failure or refusal to follow clinical practice standards, falsifying or manufacturing scientific or scholarly experiments or research, and soliciting, aiding, abetting, concealing, or attempting such acts.

Plagiarism is defined as including, without limitation, the act of representing the work of another as one’s own. Plagiarism may consist of copying, paraphrasing, or otherwise using written or oral work of another without proper acknowledgment of the source or presenting oral or written material prepared by another as one’s own.

In the event of academic misconduct, the instructor may request the Student Assessments and Standards Committee of the Environmental Studies Program to impose on a student the sanction of a failing grade on an individual assignment or on the course as a whole. The chair of the Program may recommend to the dean of Students other sanctions, such as dismissal from a major or from the University.

Note: Reading newspapers, listening to music with headphones, reading your email, playing on a computer, repeatedly leaving the classroom, cell phone ringing (turn your phones to “vibrate” when you enter the classroom if you must keep them on), and/or ANY other inappropriate behavior that is distracting is unacceptable. If your behavior is causing a distraction (i.e. people looking at you and not involved in the class) this will be considered disruptive. In the event of classroom disruption the student(s) will be asked to leave and receive a zero for material missed. In the event of continued misconduct, the instructor may request the Student Assessments and Standards Committee and the Chair of the Department to recommend to the Dean of Students other sanctions, such as dismissal from the course, their major, or from the University.

Students with disabilities:

Persons with documented disabilities should visit the Disability Support Services Office, located in Peck Hall, room 1311, at their earliest convenience to meet the director and discuss available services. The student should also, make an appointment with the instructor as soon as possible to discuss any special arrangements.

Tentative Lecture Outline:

Date	Topics	Chapters	Assignment	Due Date
August 23	Introduction; Site/Risk Assessment; Overview of an Aquatic Ecological Risk Assessment
August 30	Site investigation; Sampling plan; Statistics and geostatistics in Environmental Monitoring	1 & 2	P1-#1; P23-#1,6; P25-#5,8;P43-#1,5; Handout; Paper critique
Sept .13	Sampling equipment and sample preparations; Air Sampling; Critique	3 & 4	TBA
**Sept. 17	Sampling – Air
Sept. 27	Finish air sampling; Soils and Sediment sampling	4 & 5	TBA
**Oct. 1	Sampling – Soil
Oct. 11	Finish Soils/Sediments; Water Sampling; Presentations (2)	5 & 6	TBA
Oct. 18	Maps in Environmental monitoring; GIS and its use in Environmental monitoring; Presentations (3)
**Oct 22	Sampling – Water
Nov. 1	Sampling Drums and Containers; Alternative sampling techniques; Presentations (3)	6 & 7	TBA	Papers Due Nov. 8
**Nov. 5	Sampling – Aquatic organisms and small mammal traps
Nov. 22	THANKSGIVING – No Class
Nov. 29	Biota/Vegetation; Data Validation; Presentations (2)	9	Final	7/14
Dec. 13	Final Due (6:00 pm)

**Note: we are not meeting the following Tuesdays: Sept 6 & 20; Oct 4 and 25; Nov 8 and 15; and Dec 6.

Guidelines and Helpful hints for Term Paper/Presentation

Each student is to find and review an article discussing a sampling method and/or technique. The written review is to be 3-4 pages of single spaced text (points will be deducted if the paper is not single spaced; have one inch margins; Times New Roman-12 point font (not in bold); have page numbers on each page except the first page;) and the presentations should be 10-15 minutes in length. All papers will be due on July 12^th.

Papers:

The papers should first introduce the article and the intent of the study. In so doing, you should address some currently accepted techniques for sampling the selected media (air, soil, water, etc.), the intricacies of the sampling technique, and how the sampling events fit into the scheme of Site Characterization. The paper should discuss how the sampling technique works (deposition, absorption, passive diffusion, etc.). Hopefully you will be able to find somewhere in the literature a case study or two (in some cases these are called field validations). What are the merits and disadvantages of the sampling technique? Are their circumstances when this technique would not work? What are the authors’ (and yours) overall conclusions and recommendations.

Presentations:

Format: The presentations should be given using PowerPoint. Use of a few overheads is acceptable, however, every effort should be made to scan images into PowerPoint.

Content: The presentation should be 25-30minutes in length and model the format of the paper. It might be helpful for the audience if there is a more general and lengthier discussion of HOW the technique works. Additionally, it would be of interest to all if you included detailed information of the field trials.

Group Project/Assessment

The overall scope of the Projects are to design the most effective sampling plan to characterize a Superfund site as part of an ecological risk assessment. Each group will be assigned a case study and/or an un-characterized waste site. The plans are to be complete meaning from sampling areas, sampling plans, sampling equipment, and a “ball-park” estimate of the cost associated with the characterization.

More information will be provided.