It will focus on subsistence and take place in a native village. The NSF funding provides vital, but quite limited, initial development money. The environmental challenges threatening the biosphere do not fit neatly into one discipline. Students seeking careers in the environmental sciences or as teachers deserve educational experiences that span disciplinary boundaries and seek to overcome the confusion of which Bacon warned They should be trained to think in terms of Earth systems, rather than within the confines of a single university department. The complex, interdependent and dynamic nature of the Earth system is most easily conveyed to students through fieldwork.
Rainfall infiltrates or runs off depending upon the nature of soil and topography.
Soil is formed by its history of water infiltration, vegetation growth, microbial activity and animal burrowing in the context of bedrock composition, the slope of the land and the overall balance between erosion and deposition. Vegetation, in turn, depends on the climate, the soil and the animals that move soil, pollen, and seeds. All of these factors depend not only on current environmental conditions, but also on past conditions that set the stage for current ecosystem processes and on human manipulations of the environment. Our new field school will teach students to understand landscapes and their uses by people in an integrated fashion. The field school will emphasize field data collection by students and application of the data to tests of conceptual and numerical models built by students.