F&W ECOL 875 · Fall 2026

AI-Assisted Research Workflows

Over four sessions you take one research project through the whole cycle, from idea to shared result. Zotero keeps your sources, Obsidian keeps your thinking, and Claude works as a research assistant. You keep the judgment, the checking, and the authorship.

Meets once a week for 4 weeks, 3 h 45 min eachCredits 1 (15 h in class, 30 h outside)Instructor Min Chen · mchen392@wisc.edu

Before Week 1

We install everything together in Week 1, and you write your project summary and do the prompt ladder in class. Before then, only: get a Claude Pro plan, turn off the model-training setting, and bring a laptop you can install software on. There is nothing to read beforehand. The list is under Week 1 → Before class.

Your anchor project

Everything in this course happens on one real project you choose: a thesis chapter, a planned study, or a dataset you need to analyze. Each week's work adds to a research record you keep. If you don't have a project yet, use the class project: How much of the year-to-year variation in burned area does fire-season aridity (vapor pressure deficit) explain, and does that hold across regions? It comes with three papers and a synthetic dataset of burned area in ten fire regions.

"Experiments" in this course are computational: no fieldwork and no wet lab. You analyze your own data, or the class dataset, under a written plan: Claude Code builds the analysis, tests and reviewer agents check it, you decide what to fix, and git records every version so that someone else can rerun it.

How each session runs

Every lab on this site is a step-by-step tutorial: each step says what to do, what you should see when it worked, and what to try if it didn't. Tick "Done" as you go; code follows the R/Python switch in the sidebar.

Every session follows the same rhythm, so you always know what's coming:

PartWhat happens
Setup checkConfirm your tools work before the labs start. In Week 1 the whole class installs and connects the tools together.
Framing and demoA short talk on one idea, then a live demonstration.
LabsHands-on work on your own project or the class project, with step-by-step instructions and prompts on this site.
Break-it exerciseA planted problem to find: wrong citations, a flawed script, bad data, a hidden instruction.
DebriefWhat surprised you, what Claude missed, and what to practice before next time. Weeks 1 and 2 end with a short exit ticket.

New to terms like agent, MCP, hook, skill, or vault? The Glossary explains each one in plain language and says where it comes up in the course.

Four habits, every week

Verify

Nothing an AI produces goes into your work until you have checked it against a source, a test, or your own expertise.

Log

Keep an AI-use log: tool, prompt, purpose, what you kept, and how you checked it. From Week 3 a hook writes part of it for you.

Disclose

Anything you write with AI help, in this course or in your research, ends with a specific disclosure statement. See AI rules and data.

Stay the author

AI may draft, suggest, and critique. You decide, justify, and take responsibility for every claim.

Grading

The course is graded Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory, based on attending the four sessions and taking part in the labs and the exit tickets of Weeks 1 and 2. There are no scored assignments. Between sessions you'll find suggested practices and suggested readings that carry each week's methods over to your own project; do what helps you.

The full syllabus, including university policies, is posted on Canvas.