Spring Ecosystems and Plants
NRE 402 / Environ 402
Credits: 4

This field course is open to undergraduate and graduate students. This course is appropriate as an introduction or continuation of plant and ecosystem identification skills. It serves as an excellent complement to NRE 337/Bio 355 Woody Plants and NRE 435 Forest Ecology. Course materials emphasizes identification of herbaceous flowering plants, horsetails, scouring rushes, club mosses, and ferns of landscape ecosystems in southern Michigan. All labs are in the field: habitats include moraine, ice contact, river floodplain, deciduous and coniferous swamps, lake, bog, fen, marsh, and lake plain sites. Two extended field trips explore the plants and ecosystems of great lake shores and Walpole Island lake plain prairies. Site/habitat conditions and ecological relationships, as well as plant indicator values are stressed. NRE 337/437 or Bio 355 recommended.