Written by: Amy Wells, Maja Krzic, Sandra Brown, Art Bomke
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
Presented on the work that was done on the Virtual Soils project to an international audience of soil science information professionals highlighting the success that was had at the "From Seeds to Foods" exhibition earlier in the year!
https://www.fao.org/global-soil-partnership/resources/events/detail/en/c/1742914/Attended the conference on behalf of the University of British Columbia, and the Faculty of Land and Food Systems to showcase the programs available at UBC, alongside the research being done in SoilRES3 on land-people-soil relationships, specifically on the research on Forest Gardens, utilizing a Virtual Reality demo of Virtual Soils.
https://www.fao.org/seeds-to-foods/enPresented "Making Soils More Accessible Through the use of Radiance Fields" during the "Innovative Approaches in Soil Science Education" session to an international audience of students, educators, and researchers. As a graduate student I competed in the Oral Student Presentation competition, and for my presentation I won the first and the C.F. Bentley Award.