A transportable image analysis computer system is being used for the objective acquisition, analysis, and presentation of diverse imagery data collected in the field and laboratory. Primary goals in the extensive undergraduate field projects supported through this award are to illustrate limitations on population distributions; students thus uncover major limits at opposite boundaries in zonation along environmental gradients. Nearby marshes on San Francisco Bay provide gradients between marine, aquatic, and terrestrial environments, both natural and disturbed. One such set of quantitative experimental field ecology studies is providing students with valuable insights into field experimentation through high-resolution, time-lapse monitoring of transplant experiments. Students are comparing the fates of plants (and of sedentary animals) that have been moved experimentally beyond their normal zones, with the fates of replaced individuals. These studies strikingly illustrate the selection pressures that operate when an organism attempts to invade a new habitat. Such modern field experimental approaches are preparing students to make practical, technical, and logical applications of science in their personal lives and, for some, in environmental careers.
