Written by: Amy Wells, Maja Krzic, Sandra Brown, Art Bomke
Abstract:
To enhance student learning about impacts of soil management practices, the Sustainable Soil Management course at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver led development of a long-term, student-generated soil data set focused on the UBC Farm, a teaching, research, and community engaged production farm. The objectives of this paper are to (i) describe development of the student-generated soil data set, (ii) illustrate data interpretation done by students in the Sustainable Soil Management course, and (iii) outline key implications of having the long-term student-generated data set for sustainable soil management at a university farm. The data set, generated by students using the same sampling protocol and analytical methods since 2004, provides a long-term record of soil properties for each of the 27 fields at the UBC Farm. Students are engaged in a real-life scenario, collecting data and assessing the impacts of soil management practices on soil health. Concurrently, the data set allows the farm manager to assess the impacts of their soil management practices, and to monitor soil health. Despite various challenges such as the need for continuing funding for laboratory analyses, quick turnaround time of laboratory analyses, and ongoing maintenance of the database associated with the student-generated soil data set, having such a data set are still of enormous importance, benefiting both students and farm managers. The UBC student-generated soil data set can serve as an example for other instructors interested in involving students in long-term monitoring and data generation at university farms.
Open Access at: https://doi.org/10.1139/cjss-2024-0056