FYE 101 - Our Green World: Discovering Science in Nature

This course will celebrate the biodiversity of the plant kingdom and the role that plants play in providing valuable ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration. Plants are Earth’s first defense against anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions while also being highly vulnerable to climate change. Plants are ecosystem engineers and occupy the base of most food chains.

They provide humans with food, beverages, medicines, recreational drugs, fiber, and building materials. Have you thanked a plant today? In this class we will hug trees, develop an appreciation for their beauty and diversity, assess their diversity on the Wheaton campus, and explore their ability to ameliorate climate change and pollution. This course will also examine how nature uses green plants to clean up contaminated soil, groundwater, and wastewater. Students in this FYE will learn about how plants remediate contaminated wastewater. They will apply these principles to waste tea leaves as sorbent for removal of toxic heavy metals from wastewater. Molecular modeling software MOE will be employed to model the interaction of chemical structures found in tea waste with toxic heavy metals.

Credits 1

Compass Attributes
First Year Experience