The southern Appalachian mountains are perhaps best described as a land of contradictions. On one hand, the southern mountains are a biological marvel, serving as a world hotspot of biodiversity for amphibians and aquatic wildlife. The Clinch River system of southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee, for example, stands alone as one of the North American continent’s richest watersheds in terms of freshwater mussels. From a purely aesthetic perspective, the region is also one of the continent’s most beautiful and scenic areas, with a remarkable amount of biodiversity structured by millennia of ecological and evolutionary processes run wild.
However, southern Appalachia is also an area with many pressing social issues. The southern mountains consistently harbor some of the poorest counties in the nation, due in part to their geographic isolation. Many residents live an hour or more from basic medical care, and students from the region consistently lack access to tools and technologies present in more developed regions and, as a result, rank among the bottom in comparisons with students nationwide. Students’ understanding of biological topics is one glaring example of this gap, as Appalachian states rank among the lowest in the whole country for both acceptance of scientific topics and teaching effectiveness in the field. This is a glaring issue for the education of the region’s students, especially since these students will have to compete in a global job market that is becoming increasingly based on scientific principles.
This monthly web series has come about to address this gap, and exists for two reasons. The first is that while the educational literature on ecology and evolutionary biology – such as textbooks and online content – is rife with wonderful examples of scientific principles in action, many of these examples (think Darwin’s finches) are located in geographic regions far from the southern U.S. and are entirely detached from any student’s broader societal context. Research has shown that educational examples tied to a preexisting cultural background are highly effective science teaching strategies in rural areas, and thus local examples of ecology and evolution in action stand to be far more effective at communicating what we know about these concepts than those from the tropics or abroad. For the southern Appalachians, however, few of these examples are published outside of the primary literature.
Second, this series comes in part as a direct request from students for examples such as those described above to be presented in the classroom. Many of the case studies published here have been used in collegiate biology instruction to introduce relevant topics and bring peer-reviewed research into the classroom, and the goal of this web series is to make these examples available to a wider audience. Educators may feel free to use any part of this series when considering curriculum design, with the prior knowledge that these are presented as suggestions only and have not been approved as any type of formal biology curriculum. The ultimate goal of this series is not to make you an expert on the finer points of ecological and evolutionary theory but rather to introduce some of the field’s basic topics using species and ecosystems common to the region. Several links are posted at the bottom of this page to more generalized educational material involving evolutionary biology, in particular, in order to lay the foundation for some of the topics to be detailed here. Monthly installments of this series will appear on my site’s front page and will also appear linked in the sidebar to the right. Locations mentioned in individual installments of the series are featured on the map below.
(Note: if you have a particular example that you feel might benefit the series, feel free to send me an email at whsmith01@gmail.com. All content on this site is additionally the intellectual property of the author but can be reproduced with permission and proper attribution by contacting the author at the same email address above.)
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General links on evolutionary biology:
PBS Evolution Library
Understanding Evolution (UC Berkeley website)
The National Center for Science Education’s Evolution page
Evolution resources from Appalachian State University (a regional clearinghouse for general evolution info)
Appalachian Biodiversity and Society Lab 
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