In early October, Adjuct Professor Dorothy Peteet and the 20 students in her "Wetlands and Climate Change" course (W4835) traveled to Nantucket for a field class in the bog and salt marsh ecosystems on the island. The group piled into the two department vans on a Friday morning, drove to Hyannis, Massachussetts, and then took the ferry to Nantucket Island. Fieldwork began in earnest Saturday morning in the pouring rain, and fortunately the field station provided them with hip boots for the inevitable mucky forays. The class of 20 split into 2 groups; one explored the No Bottom Pond Bog with Professor Peteet (seated in photo at right), while the other explored a salt marsh with graduate student Sanpisa Sritrairat, teaching assistant Alejandra Borunda, and Dr. Sarah Oktay (Field Station Director, University of Massachussetts, Nantucket). By afternoon the heavy rains diminished and the students switched groups so everyone experienced both ecosystems.

The class retrieved sediment cores from both the bog and salt marsh ecosystems, collecting 6 meters of sediment in the bog (reaching glacial clay) and 2 meters in the salt marsh (a younger formation).  In addition, the students learned typical bog plants such as cotton grass, sundews, and Sphagnum moss, and salt marsh plants such as Spartina alterniflora, Spartina patens, and Salicornia. The group spent 2 nights in the field station, where the they organized and enjoyed a wonderful barbeque supper, and then returned to New York on Sunday. As a follow-up assignment, the students submitted short proposals for studying some aspect of these ecosystems.  Back in the classroom, they will examine some of the core sediments for macrofossils, and create a timeline of vegetational change.

In past years, the "Wetlands and Climate Change" course included 3 Saturday field trips in the Hudson Valley, to the salt marshes of Staten Island or Jamaica Bay, the riparian habitats of Glycerin Hollow in Black Rock Forest, and Green Pond Bog in Harriman State Park. This year, a grant from the Earth Institute allowed Professor Peteet to take her students on the 3-day trip to Nantucket where they could actually see more pristine salt marshes (and core them) and see different types of bogs (and core them).   Professor Peteet’s other strong motive for the trip to Nantucket is that it is important for her research. Says Peteet, "The glacial moraine there requires further accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating of tundra plant macrofossils in kettle depressions (bogs) for comparison with cosmogenic ages on the erratic boulders along that moraine. There is a big controversy over the timing of deglaciation in this region."  As for 2011 (the course runs alternate years,) Professor Peteet says she would love to take the class to Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard again, or some other wetland region – maybe the Georgia salt marshes... or even Alaska.