ACCESS TO FIELD SITES: A GROWING CONCERN FOR GEOSCIENCE EDUCATION

Field experiences in the form of class activities, laboratories, day trips, regional excursions, and field camps have been a fundamental part of geoscience education for the past century. Good field sites are hard to find. The selection of field sites is often limited by distance from home base, land access, weather, and geologic settings that are simultaneously illustrative of features or processes of interest, that allow students to make key observations and reasonable interpretations, and where field projects can be formulated that are within the scope of students’ abilities. Unfortunately, “classic” field localities, some of national distinction and others that have been used in local settings for training generations of geoscientists, are increasingly being placed off limits to geoscience field instruction. In many cases, private lands that host field sites are either being sub-divided are use of the lands have been exclusively leased for private use. It is also increasingly difficult to run field programs on federal lands administered by the United States Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management. It is in the interest of the geoscience community to proactively work to keep field sites accessible for the training of students and for continued professional development of working geoscientists. Collectively, we should: o seek to establish national, state and local heritage sites that preserve classic, and irreproducible sites of geologic interest; work with federal land managers to assess the value added to their lands through educational activities; o work with private landowners to maintain permission to access their lands, and attempt to secure long-term conservation easement; o educate the public about special features of field sites; private and agency land managers may not be aware of the rich educational resources on their lands; o become stewards of these field sites; develop a new ethic regarding sampling of sites to ensure that outcrops are not destroyed and key relations are preserved; develop integrated databases of road logs, maps, sample localities, and archives of images and analytical data to be shared by all. Geoscientists must work on the national and local level, independently and as a community, to ensure that future generations will enjoy access to essential field training.