Before taking this course, I did not know that ENVS 220 was the Environmental Studies’ methods course. At Lewis and Clark, you tend to hear a lot of dread from students towards the prospect of taking their respective methods courses. This talk did not do much to change my opinion. This lack of fear was for a couple reasons: my favorite parts of school tend to be when I can learn through hands on work and, to be blunt, I had to take this course as I am an ENVS major so there was no reason for me to be anxious over something out of my control. So far, environmental analysis, the department’s term for methods, has been my favorite part of the course. Over the first five weeks of the semester we carried out a lab to study anthropogenic sources of land cover change in and around the Lewis and Clark campus. Through this study, we applied the lectures and readings we have done to a practical setting. We eventually got to share our results with local residents and other students through story maps.
This lab really let us explore how an actual land cover survey would be conducted. The lab had its limitations, but it still gave us insight in how we would interact with a local community and choose to display our results in an effective manner. In this first week, my lab partner Steffen and I walked to a house in the Collins View neighborhood where we had been given permission to place a site to observe land and canopy cover. When we arrived at the house, we met the owners, Xavier and Constance, who were incredibly kind.
In doing this lab, I learned some of the difficulties and limitations present in doing environmental analysis. One problem we came across was that our site included a sizable portion of land that we were not allowed to access. This limited our ability to sample how anthropogenic sources have affected the land cover in Collins View. Another limitation is that this lab was too short term. Since this is a course and we have to move on with other material, we did not have time to gather much data that could show change over time. This made our conclusions pretty insignificant as they were based on data that felt unfinished.
Personally, I felt that we gained more from our qualitative research, as our quantitative analysis left something to be desired. On Monday, October 1 we had a panel discussion with people from all three of the general locations we studied in our lab. These five people offered insights into their locations that we could not have gained through our own data collection. For example Denise King knew a lot about the history of the campus and the various uses it had over the last century. Some of the other panelists offered information on the changes made in both the River View Natural and Collins View. Their information helped contextualize and explain the research we had done both on our sites and looking at aerial photographs.
Simon's Site 