Climate Dynamics

Students will undertake study on Climate Change and its effects on any organism, ecosystem, biological process, or physical process for this project (ex: atmospheric process, water cycle, nutrient cycling, etc.).

Students will create a hypothesis on the influence of climate change on your chosen topic (ex: Climate change has a negative effect on polar bear populations in the arctic). Students will submit their hypotheses to me by week 2 of class for approval to write the paper, which is due the last week of class.

Papers must be grammatically correct and written clearly. Please keep in mind to include references and citations.Citations:  Your paper should include in-text citation following APA format.  You should have at least 5 citations. Within the text of your paper, you need to cite each source of information related to your references.

There are several ways add a citation within the text. If the information applies to only one sentence, you generally list the reference at the end of the sentence in parentheses. You list the author followed by the date. A comma separates the author and date (ex: Jones, 1999).

Title: This should be a concise description of your topic.

Introduction:

The introduction should provide background information on your topic. The bulk of your citations should be here. Also, your hypothesis should be clearly stated here.

Methods:

Here, you describe techniques and practices used to answer your questions. Since this is a literature review, you will discuss where and how you collected journal articles and other sources of information.

Discussion:

Here you will discuss the results. Here, you should also re-state the hypothesis and address if you hypothesis was supported by data.

References

The purpose of a list of references is to allow the reader to find where you obtained your information so the reader may refer to the original document if desired. You need at least five separate references from peer reviewed journals for your paper.

References fall into different categories: peer-reviewed journals, popular journals, gray literature, and books. You will find the most accurate and technical scientific information in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Ecology, Science, Nature, etc. Your paper should have at least five references from a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. The author or authors who wrote the scientific paper sent it to the journal to be published. The journal then sends the paper out to other scientists familiar with the technical material in the paper for review. Only if the other scientists say the research is well done will the journal publish the paper, which is why they are called “peer-reviewed.” Such a paper will inform the reader on how the information was collected and analyzed. Each year many thousands of scientific papers are published in peer-reviewed journals.