Muhlenberg College Biology Professor Receives NSF Grant To Study Ecology
Richard Niesenbaum, Ph.D., associate professor of biology at Muhlenberg College, has received an $81,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology.Friday, October 18, 2002 11:10 AM
Richard Niesenbaum, Ph.D., associate professor of biology at Muhlenberg College, has received an $81,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology. The research award will support his study of how experimenter visitation and measurement affect plant growth and the ecology of plant-insect interactions.
Niesenbaum and his colleagues term this experimenter effect the "ecological uncertainty principle" based on Werner Heisenberg's 1927 proposition that there are fundamental limitations to the study of subatomic particles, as the act of measuring them can affect their behavior. Niesenbaum's work is confirming that such uncertainty also occurs in ecological studies, where visiting plants to measure rates of herbivory actually changes those rates and significantly impacts the plant-insect interactions being studied. The implications of such "visitation effects" are enormous, and the proposed work will permit him to more substantially test whether visitation and measurement of plants alters rates of herbivory and plant growth, and will increase our understanding of the mechanisms responsible for these effects.
This interdisciplinary research is being done in collaboration with Christine Ingersoll, assistant professor of chemistry at Muhlenberg, and J.C. Cahill at the University of Alberta. Sumana Rao, a visiting scientist in Niesenbaum's lab, will also be involved in the project. Much of the funding will go to support undergraduate involvement in the research, and so far the work has involved Muhlenberg's Jeffrey Dipple '03, Lauren Mastro '03, Richard Kipp '04, Emily Kluger '04, and Steph Zettel '05, who have developed independent research projects that relate to the overall mission of this work. With additional funding from the National Science Foundation, there may also be an opportunity for an Allentown School District teacher to be involved in the work in the coming summer.
Results from this research will challenge the long-standing assumption that field researchers are "benign observers," as the essential act of visiting plants during an experiment could alter the performance of those plants. It may motivate us to re-think the way that we measure and test hypotheses about herbivory, plant growth and productivity, and other plant-animal interactions. This work is essential to understanding possible strategies to mitigate any potential observer effect in future studies, and will provide information about the basic ecology of plant-animal interactions in natural plant communities. An additional major goal is to advance undergraduate education by giving students primary roles in a significant ecological research project.
