Teaching Groundwater Hydrology in a Wetland Ecology Class

Abstract

I taught Wetland Ecology 25 times: 15 as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and UM-Dearborn while I worked at the USGS-Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor and 10 as the Empire Innovation Professor of Wetland Science at SUNY--The College at Brockport in my native western New York State. During the first year in giving the wetland hydrology lectures in Michigan, founded on water budgets, I realized that non-hydrology students had great difficulty understanding groundwater. They can see surface water and precipitation and likely learned about evapotranspiration in a plant ecology course. However, groundwater is an unseen mystery, and typical text material is too complicated to unravel that mystery. Fortunately, about that time, my friend, the late Tom Winter, handed me the new USGS Circular 1139 – Ground Water and Surface Water: a Single Resource (Winter et al. 1998), and I quickly realized that I had a solution.