A Watershed Based Approach to Environmental Education Integrating Ecology, Hydrology, and Geochemistry

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Earth System Science (40) This project adapts and implements approaches from published studies and recent NSF-CCLI projects in developing a cross-disciplinary watershed-based approach to environmental education within the watershed on the Binghamton University campus. The approach involves integrated study of physical, chemical and biological processes at three field sites within areas of differing land use. Instrumentation installed within the watershed is being used in hands-on learning activities, and is within walking distance of classrooms on campus. Pollution is serving as the common unifying theme as students assess the complexity of biogeochemical processes. The project is directly linking concepts within three courses in three disciplines: Environmental Hydrology (Environmental Studies), Environmental Measurements (Geology), and Ecosystem Ecology (Biology). Students, including future K-12 science teachers, are participating in designing and evaluating field exercises and in archiving the environmental data being collected. Project data is being archived in a website for rapid dissemination and retrieval. This multidisciplinary approach to environmental education is allowing students from diverse backgrounds to discover that processes ongoing in a mixed land-use watershed have universal relevance to quality of life issues and concerns including: 1) atmospheric deposition and its relation to air quality; 2) subsurface processes and the relation to groundwater quality, and 3) the relation of land use to surface water quality. The hydrological-geological-ecological linkage, using sites within a watershed on campus as the common platform, is providing an approach to studying earth system processes that is directly applicable to environmental problem solving in the real world.