Environmental Sampling
ENSC 520
Fall Semester 2005
Environmental Sciences
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Tuesday 6:00 – 8:50 pm, SL 3225
Saturday 9:00am –3:00 pm, SL 0218
Course Instructor:
Dr. Kevin A. Johnson, SL 3316 650-5934, kevjohn@siue.edu
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 12th.
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.