Prerequisites

A minimum of one introductory-level course in the Environmental Sciences, and some additional coursework in chemistry, biology, earth materials, calculus, or physics.

Overview

The course is designed to introduce students to field-based scientific investigations and is usually taken in the summer between the sophomore and junior year. Students are expected to be science majors with an interest in environmental science; the course is required as part of the B.S. in Environmental Science, but may be taken by students with other majors. The course is designed to provide students with first hand experience in various aspects of the environmental sciences including ecology, environmental chemistry, geology, hydrology, and meteorology as well as provide field experience related to subjects discussed in courses within a general environmental science core curriculum.

The practical training provided will have a strong interdisciplinary science base and will include contributions from climatologists, ecologists, biologists, and geoscientists with a broad range of backgrounds. The techniques and methods employed will require students to apply basic principles from biology, chemistry, geology, mathematics, and physics to solve the problems they encounter.

Much of the training will occur within the instrumented Willow Creek Demonstration Watershed. This area will serve as an outdoor laboratory for multiple teaching modules. Students will benefit from the use of the same general field area for different themes (e.g. bedrock geology, soil characteristics, groundwater hydrology, vegetation community structure, etc.) so they can mentally and physically interrelate ecosystem components. The Demonstration Watershed has a number of sites with permanently installed monitoring equipment. The course includes caravan trips to pertinent localities including several Superfund sites.

The course is organized into two parts. The first part involves extensive teaching, including three days of instruction in Bloomington, designed to provide background concepts and introductions to instrumentation and computer applications that will be used during the course. In Montana, field instruction takes place in small groups and in one-on-one situations. Individual exercises have specific, focused themes that reflect the various disciplines that are involved in environmental science (e.g., botany, aquatic chemistry, soils). During the latter portion of the course, students work on a single final project where they integrate the various types of investigations and approaches they have learned in the course. This project emphasizes independent work.

Key Curriculum Materials

• Bedrock and surficial geology
• Hydrogeology and soils
• Field instrumentation and large data-set manipulation
• Biomes and ecotones
• Vegetation community structure and dynamics
• Field chemistry
• Aquatic biology
• Applications (acid mine drainage, irrigation schedules, environmental impact assessment)

Equipment Used

• Electrical tape, pressure transducers and data loggers for recovering time series data for seasonal water level determinations and for performing slug test on monitoring wells.
• Portable micrometeorologic masts for determining spatial variations in energy budget comparisons.
• Current meters for measuring stream flow and calibrating stream gauging stations.
• Portable, high-quality meters for measuring field chemistry (pH, Eh, DO, SpC).
• Laptop computers for downloading data from data loggers, for data reduction, and for data display and manipulation in a GIS format.

Specialty Equipment

• Guelph permeameter
• Neutron probe
• Seepage meter
• Marsh-McBirney flow-meter
• Portable micrometeorology mast
• Bison 7000 12-channel signal-stacking seismic recording system
• Worden Pioneer gravimeter
• Sensors + software, Inc. pluse EKKO IV Ground Penetrating Radar System with 50 and 200 MHz antennae.
• GIS software for data manipulation and display