Achievement

Our IGERT has had significant, concrete outcomes in the last 12 months. These include the Agents-of-Change reports and projects from the first year of courses, completed in 8/11. The projects were selected by students, in collaboration with NGOs, agencies, or community groups, and were the “living laboratories”, uniting the six IGERT core courses. In each course, the students took the concepts and applied them to the selected environmental issue. They developed reports and projects based on their course findings, which have been provided to the cooperating entity. The topics covered a diverse range of issues: How to integrate the human population into a conservation plan for a river, disruptive development in a watershed, environmental issues of the low income communities in the watershed of the San Juan Bay Estuary, and the interaction of development and the caves of Puerto Rico. These documents are now targeted for publication at a local peer-reviewed journal (Acta Cientifica)