Teaching soil science and ecology in West Siberia: 17 years of field courses

Abstract

Since 1995, soil-ecological field courses across climatic zones in West Siberia have been organized by scientists from Russia and Germany to meet growing demands for better land use practices. They are focused on virgin landscapes and soils undisturbed by anthropogenic influences to facilitate the learning processes by excluding concealing changes and artifacts. The visited landscapes range from taiga near Tomsk and tundra in Altai mountains to desert conditions near the Mongolian border. This article describes the main features of the field courses, the organization, and changes in the content over years. This includes a short description of the field course route, teaching approaches, the dynamics in the number of participants, evaluation results, and others. To explain the successes of the field courses, we suggest that the specific organization methods and collaboration approaches, the motivation of participants by several factors, and the applied interdisciplinary teaching approach should be considered. We hope our experience will facilitate similar teaching in other regions of the world and support a future sustainable use of local human and natural resources.

Keywords:

• field course
• professional education
• Siberia
• Russia
• landscape management

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to all people who had supported the field course development especially to Dr Boris Smolentsev, Dr Svetlana Gizhitskaya, Dr Sofia Platonova, Dr Ilya Lubechanskiy, Dr Marina Dirks, Mr Sergey Loiko, and Ms Olga Rusalimova. Thanks to all open-minded participants who have used and supported our ideas for many years by their own participation. Special thanks to Ms Svetlana Gretton (Essex University, UK) for advice and support on this manuscript.