Title: Environmental and Organismal Properties of Heat Transfer and Absorption

Life depends on an essentially continuous exchange of mass and energy between living organisms and their environment. Human impact on this vital exchange has occurred on a global or macroclimate scale. This human influence has impacted local physical environments of organisms and directly or indirectly affected their survival and thus biodiversity of our planet. Energy transfer between the organism and environment is critically sensitive to changes in ambient temperature, wind, solar radiation and humidity. The ability of animals to perform or sustain a given behavior, such as foraging or reproduction, is limited by their capacity to balance their energy intake with energy expenditure. Estimating energetic costs of responses of animals to such important environmental stresses are of fundamental importance because of the impact energy balance has on their survivability and thus our ability to predict the impact of global climate change on animal abundance and distributions in the future.

This workshop will focus on the understanding of the physical principles involved in heat transfer and absorption in the atmosphere and how these physical factors affect living organisms. The specific objectives of this workshop are two-fold: First, to provide teachers with hands-on exercises that can be brought back to their classrooms coupled with pedagogical methods for designing and teaching effective labs in environmental studies; Second, to provide teachers with an investigative research-based experience. The overall educational goal of the workshop is to enhance teacher capabilities to understand and teach critical thinking skills and extend learning beyond knowledge and comprehension to application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

The first portion of the workshop will involve a series of experiments performed in the laboratory to address questions that emphasize the underlying principles of heat transfer, convection, conduction, radiation and humidity. Other experiments will explore the relation between temperature, humidity, and cloud formation, the forces that govern fluid motion or wind and ocean currents, and global warming. The research portion of the workshop will focus on how and why animals adjust to changes in their physical environments with emphasis placed on the effects of temperature on living organisms. The primary research question we will address is: How does variability in thermal microclimates affect the rate of heat exchange and energy expenditure of free-living animals? To accomplish this we will determine metabolic rate by respiratory gas analyses and perform measurements of surface temperatures of live animals using infrared (IR) thermography. The link (EZresearch) provides diagrams of the conceptual framework of this research, experimental design and IR photographs.