Returning to nature: Hands-on skills gained during Field Week

The best place to learn about the environment is beyond the classroom, in the fields, lakes, rivers and wetlands. For students in the environmental sciences diploma program at Lakeland, heading outside to work on practical skills is just an ordinary day – but during Field Week, those adventures go beyond the ordinary. It’s a week-long, intense series of outdoor labs, where students put learning into action, perfecting the skills they need to thrive in the workplace.

Kendall Leuschen, a second-year student majoring in land stewardship and conservation (LSC)*, spent the last day of Field Week assessing a wetland south of the Vermilion campus.

“We’re looking at this whole area. We’re seeing if it’s healthy and what sort of reclamation we can do on the site,” she explains. “I’ve also been learning how to identify plants and soils and their horizons.”

For Leuschen, learning how to return a site to its natural state is an important part of studying environmental sciences.

“I decided to study environmental sciences so I know what I’m looking at when I’m outside, so I can help the environment,” Leuschen says. “I can restore everything that I’m looking at. Around Vermilion, there are a lot of oil sites and I thought it would be interesting to learn how to restore those back to their original habitats.”

During Field Week, students split their time between wetland assessments, touring mines and reclamation sites, working with songbirds and hawks, trapping mice, fish and other wildlife, and learning how to read horizons in the soil. They visit sites locally, in the Capital region and near Hinton, Alta., and work with drones, acoustic meters for bats, and heavy equipment like tractors and skid steers.

“We get to hit up all the different ecosystems. We’ll go to a grassland, we’ll go to wetlands, we’ll go to forests. We connect what we’re learning in class directly with what we see in the field,” says Jennifer McGuinness, one of Lakeland’s environmental sciences instructors.

“Having these labs provides a foundational knowledge base. These students leave with understanding of different types of ecosystems, what goes into those ecosystems and what the components in those systems really need. If they’re working on a project where there is a disturbance or if they’re trying to fix something, they can have this in-depth understanding of what’s going wrong and they’re not afraid to get out there and measure it or evaluate it or dive in and look.”

Learning hands-on skills like those practiced during Field Week is a critical component of what sets environmental sciences at Lakeland apart.

“Hands-on skills like these give me an advantage in applying for jobs. I’ve visited with a few university students who are studying in similar environmental sciences program and they feel like they don’t have the hands-on ability to use equipment that employers are looking for,” says Elisabeth Walker, also in her second year of LSC.

She adds that environmental reclamation and protection is becoming more critical.

“Environmental sciences are really important, especially right now with what’s going on, both politically and with climate change,” Walker says. “It’s something that’s definitely becoming more forefront in the workforce and careers in general. There’s a lot more focus on restoration, reclamation and remediation, and all the other things that are involved in putting back some of the function and health of what the environment used to be before humans exploded in population and degraded a lot of the area.”

*Formerly conservation and reclamation ecology (CARE)