Foundational Field Skills for Earth and Environmental Sciences

Foundational Field Skills for Earth and Environmental Sciences

This course focusses on your proficiency of field skills and contextual knowledge within earth and environmental sciences. Each section focuses on a specific skill set and represents a way of acknowledging achievements or skill acquisition at a granular level.

Key field skills included in this course are navigation, field observations and note-taking, and field sketching.

Field Observations and Note-taking

This section introduces how to set yourself up to be an effective observer and recorder using the platform of a field notebook. A field notebook serves many potential purposes. It is a valuable record of what you have seen, heard, discussed, and thought about in the field. It may contain the data which will lead to an oral presentation, a report, thesis, or even a scientific journal article. It may be a graded portion of a course. Or it may be something you and your relatives will find interesting decades in the future.

This section provides you with the knowledge, platforms, skills to guide you in taking quality and organised notes while in the field.

Navigation

The purpose of this section is to learn the fundamentals behind navigation and to develop core navigation skills. Today’s technology allows more confidence and safety in outdoor activities, but there are still some fundamental knowledge and skills you need to have to effectively use these.