Field Station History Continued

The Savannah River Environmental Sciences Field Station started with a two- phase plan to achieve its goals. Phase one of the plan includes one-day field activities, designed for hands-on experience, in which undergraduate students visit the field station with their instructors to collect field specimens for laboratory studies and analyses later at their institutions. More than 1500 undergraduate students from the member institutions have visited the Field Station under this program. Phase two involves extended semester and summer courses that are offered at the Field Station by faculty in the different areas of environmental science, agriculture, engineering and natural resource management.

Field Station programs are not only designed to increase science literacy of students, they also aid in recruitment and retention of minority students through career redirection. The first multi-week courses to implement the long-term goals of the Field Station were offered in the summer of 1998. In the summer of 2000 seven undergraduate courses were taught at the Station. Graduate courses leading to the certificate in Environmental Monitoring and Restoration will begin in the Spring of 2001.