Field Week 2024: Mine reclamation, prescribed burns and team building

Field week is an annual tradition for second-year environmental sciences students. It’s an intense week of labs that sees the students taking daily trips to different fields, forests and wetlands on and around campus, perfecting the hands-on skills they practiced in first year. Soil sampling, wetlands assessment, snake habitat construction, electrofishing and fish sampling are traditional items on the itinerary, as well as visits to mines in various stages of reclamation and bird sanctuaries. This year, however, the students had the opportunity to experience something new – a prescribed fire lab at the Emergency Training Centre.

For land stewardship and conservation student Olivia Hordos-Goyer, it was an especially wonderful experience, because it merged her background in emergency services with her passion for environmental sciences.

“It was awesome and showed me a side of environmental sciences that I’d never considered before. We learned about different fuel types and how to make sure the fire is safe and controlled. We learned what would make a fire burn hotter, faster, more slowly. We learned about how important communication is in those situations and how to work as a team. One of the instructors works with Indigenous communities and brought out a traditional torch, which was a wonderful cultural aspect to see as well.”

A prescribed fire is one deliberately set to manage the environment. Hordos-Goyer explains that it can be a way to deal with issues like too much litter material, which, when burned away, can help restore nutrients to the soil and give it a fresh start. It can also help with invasive plant species.

Hordos-Goyer and her classmates also spent a night at the Strathcona Wilderness Centre, first working with Project Forest to sample different plots to monitor tree growth. They spent the night sharing dinner and a bonfire, growing closer as a class. The next day, they toured a mine in the process of reclamation, which she lists as another highlight of the week.

“The engineer spoke to us about how they’d stopped production in the mine 40 years ahead of schedule. We learned about that process and what they’re doing with the site now which was really cool,” Hordos-Goyer explains. “They’re turning some of the mine site into cropland, which I never would have imagined.”

After that, the class visited a fully reclaimed mine site.

“Seeing the process and then the end product was awesome,” she says.

That hands-on experience is what drew Hordos-Goyer to Lakeland. When she decided to go into environmental sciences, she researched schools which offered the program and chose Lakeland.

“Lakeland had the most impressive courses by far,” she says. “The biggest draw for me was field work, getting the applicable skills in school and bringing them right to employment.”

Aside from some time spent in the labs and classrooms working on things like chemistry, statistics, and scientific writing, Hordos-Goyer says she and her classmates spend most of their lab time outdoors, even when it’s not Field Week.

“We’re outside all the time,” she says. “We go out in the rain, snow, everything. It’s another important aspect of the hands-on experience in field work that we learn here that will transfer perfectly to a job after. We get our work done, no matter what.”