North American biologists coming to BGSU

Biology faculty members from United States and Canadian colleges and universities will be students for a week in June at the University.

Faculty will comprise most of the more than 150 North American biologists who will be at BGSU June 8-12 for the 26th annual conference of the Association for Biology Laboratory Education (ABLE).

Coming to Ohio for the first time, the event includes 20 laboratory workshops where presenters teach a roomful of their peers as if they were students, said conference host Charlene Waggoner, Center for Environmental Programs.

ABLE members submit proposals for presentations, and those that are approved—and made—are later published as “Tested Studies for Laboratory Teaching,” she explained.

Waggoner, previously a biology faculty member at the University, began inquiring several years ago about bringing the conference to campus. She is a member of ABLE, which has requirements for laboratory facilities and equipment “that Bowling Green was easily able to meet,” she said.

As home of the drained Great Black Swamp, the Bowling Green area also offers “one of the most altered landscapes in the world,” Waggoner added. “We have remnants of environmentally unique ecosystems all around,” including Oak Openings Preserve, west of Toledo, and Lake Erie, she said.

Biology laboratory coordinators and preparation staff, as well as faculty, from Nova Scotia to New Mexico will have a chance to see some of those ecosystems on optional field trips during the conference. Among the destinations will be the Schedel Arboretum and Gardens in Elmore and the Lake Erie islands, where participants may go aboard a research vessel.

Another trip will be a June 12 tour of area parks and preserves in search of threatened and endangered species, such as cricket frogs and the Karner blue butterfly. Led by Kim High, a naturalist and historical interpreter for Toledo Metroparks, the tour will leave Bowling Green at 8 a.m. that Saturday.

Waggoner said she hopes conference participants will take several positives from their time in northwest Ohio, where they can also see a Toledo Mud Hens baseball game, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Toledo Zoo and Cedar Point.

In addition to a fruitful learning experience in the workshops, “I’m hoping in part that they (conferees) get an appreciation for the Midwest … and I’m certainly hoping they walk away with a good impression of Bowling Green State University,” she said.

While Waggoner is officially the host of the event, she said support has also come from the BGSU provost’s office, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Environmental Programs, the Center of Excellence in Science and Mathematics Education: Opportunities for Success (COSMOS), the Canadian Studies Center and the biological sciences department.