Summer 2019 at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory

Aug 13, 2019

Each summer, the University of Iowa offers several courses at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory that allow students to experience their course material first hand at sites across the Midwest, including Lake Okoboji, Austin Hill Prairie, Anderson Prairie State Reserve, and Compass Prairie. This past summer, Visiting Assistant Professor, Rebecca Kauten taught Topics in Ecology and Sustainability: Introduction to GIS and Prairie Ecology at Lakeside. Students explored prairies, quarries, lakes, caves and more in order to understand concepts of different ecosystems, ecological phenomena, and climate change. Below are selected photos of the courses this summer:

 

Prairie Ecology (IALL:3122)

Students visited both wet and dry prairies, sampled soil at various locations to compare, and spent an afternoon with Dwight Rutter, a local farmer-turned-prairie seed grower entrepreneur, who has an amazing piece of land in the Little Sioux watershed. John Pearson from Iowa DNR joined the group for two field excursions. One was to the Waterman Creek Complex, which includes an archaeological preserve in O'Brien County. The other was Fen Valley, also within the Little Sioux watershed.

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Topics in Ecology and Sustainability: Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

This included field excursions to the EROS data center in Sioux Falls, a subsequent visit to the Falls, and a trip to the Jeffers Petroglyphs about an hour north of Lakeside. There's also a county park, Red Rock Falls, where we had a picnic lunch -- much smaller than the Big Sioux Falls, but part of the same formation. The group talked not only about physical geography, bedrock maps, Sioux quartzite and glacial formations. Final projects included a report-out. In two weeks' time the course got six students who had never used a GIS of any kind making basic maps, joining tables, and interpreting data. The last day of class is a "bathymetry exercise" masked as a morning boat ride on West O. The goal? Find the deepest spot by reading the map and guiding the captain accordingly.

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If you are interested in a Lakeside Laboratory course for Summer 2020, look for course offerings on MyUI in spring 2020 or reach out to Lakeside Laboratory Executive Director, Mary Skopec or Lakeside Laboratory Instructor Rebecca Kauten.  

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