5. Passive Designs part of Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability
Randolph Chambers, College of William and Mary
In this module, we consider how the actual design and placement of buildings can be important considerations for energy efficiency, thereby optimizing winter heating and summer cooling needs. One of the simplest ...

Unit 2: Soil Characteristics and Their Relationship to Land Use Practices part of A Growing Concern
Hannah Scherer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ; Martha Murphy, Santa Rosa Junior College; Sarah Fortner, Carleton College
In a hands-on exploration, students will learn to describe and quantify the porosity and permeability of soil models representative of both agricultural and natural environments. Students will use this information ...

Unit 4: Using SoilWebTMto Investigate the Soil Beneath You part of A Growing Concern
Hannah Scherer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ; Martha Murphy, Santa Rosa Junior College; Sarah Fortner, Carleton College
Students will use SoilWeb™, a smartphone and web application that pulls detailed soil survey data from both the 1:24,0000 Soil Survey Geographic database (SSURGO) and the 1:250,000 scale State Soil Geographic ...

Unit 5: Predicting the Effects of Climate Change on Soil Loss part of A Growing Concern
Hannah Scherer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ; Martha Murphy, Santa Rosa Junior College; Sarah Fortner, Carleton College
Students will investigate how the factors that influence erosion work together to produce an overall erosion rate. In agricultural areas, these factors are rainfall-runoff erosivity, soil erodibility, slope ...

Unit 3: Natural and Agricultural Erosion Rates part of A Growing Concern
Sarah Fortner, Carleton College; Martha Murphy, Santa Rosa Junior College; Hannah Scherer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ
Students will identify their perceptions of erosion by examining images of mountain and agricultural landscapes and discussing which environment is more erosive. They will use geospatial figures to compare erosion ...

Unit 2.2: Mitigation Using Low Impact Development (LID) Controls part of An Ecosystem Services Approach to Water Resources
John Ritter, Wittenberg University; Ed Barbanell, University of Utah; Meghann Jarchow, University of South Dakota
In this activity, students model the impact of changes in land cover on stormwater runoff using the EPA's National Stormwater Calculator. Students mitigate increased stormwater runoff resulting from ...

Through Tribal Eyes: Change on the Menominee Nation part of CLEAN Collection

A River Runs Through It: an exploration in land use and water resource management part of Environmental Geology:Activities
Robin Humphreys, College of Charleston
This is an in-class activity where students learn about the interconnectedness of land use, water quality, and water resource management. Students are assigned a river front parcel of land to develop, unaware that ...

River of the Dammed part of Hydrogeology:Hydrogeology, Soils, Geochemistry 2013:Activities
Kallina Dunkle, Austin Peay State University
This activity is designed to engage students in an active debate about land use and planning, human populations, ecosystems, and sustainability by assigning every student to a "community" along a ...

Watershed area and discharge relationships part of Hydrogeology:Hydrogeology, Soils, Geochemistry 2013:Activities
Steven Petsch, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Students use USGS WaterData website to find data on area, average annual discharge and response to high-precip events in small watersheds in southern New England. Data for the class are compiled to generate graphs ...