Botany Summer Bus Tour
Students in science instructor Ken Carloni’s Field Botany course who used to trek around campus to identify plants can line up for the bus tour instead this summer.
Carloni, who teaches a field botany course during spring term on campus, usually takes his students around campus to analyze and identify plants. This new summer class, however, will be a hybrid five-week online course with a six-day bus tour of Southern Oregon and Northern California. Instead of one lab day each week, students will immerse themselves into the subject matter through a field tour with Carloni as guide and instructor.
“Field Botany is particularly fun for me because I get so many different students from all across campus,” said Carloni. “It’s a pretty popular class.”
Students trying to earn a degree online need to take a lab course just like students on campus. Working as a stand-alone science lab course, Field Botany will fulfill students’ lab requirement, but is not limited to online students. This class will fit well therefore for a variety of degrees such as viticulture and engineering. Moodle is used as the online component in place of ANGEL because Moodle is more compatible with the course’s needs.
Anyone who is relatively fit can sign up for Field Botany because the course has no prerequisites. “You don’t need to have any history or any experience in science at all. It’s really about honing your powers of observations. It’s really about learning a method,” said Carloni. The trip requires hiking for several miles over the course of the week on easy to moderate trails.
The course will begin June 25 online for the first three weeks where students will learn the “botanical keys” of method, terminology, and ecosystems. “The major thrust of the class is ‘how do you identify a plant?’” added Carloni.
The bus tour begins on the fourth week. The class will use Green Tortoise, a bus service based in San Francisco that offers a variety of travel tours. Students will use the daylight hours in field work and will sleep on the drive to each new location because the seats on these buses turn into beds for passengers to sleep in while moving between locations.
“We’re lucky at UCC to be small enough to do this kind of thing,” said Carloni.
The bus trip will cost $650 in addition to tuition; however, financial aid may pay some of the fees. Students can start signing up for the class at the start of May and a deposit is required at the end of May.
The class will travel along the North Umpqua River to Watson Falls, then head down to Crater Lake. After that, they will head to the Lava Beds National Park in Northern California.
Some of the lava tubes have sky lights, or holes, in the ceiling that allow ferns to grow inside the cave. Students will have special access to these ferns as these sites are usually off limits to the public. Actual researchers will also be available for students to speak with at these different places. They will also teach the students about what the researchers do.
Other places on the trip’s itinerary include the Redwoods, Lassen Volcanic National Park and a recovering forest that has experienced a fire. All of these places show examples of how the top edge of the Klamath Siskiyou’s range is one of the most floristically diverse areas in the world.
“From experience as a student and as a professor, I see the learning curve just steepen right up out in the field,” said Carloni. “That’s the exciting part for me, to see that ‘gee-whiz’ moment happen out there in the field where somebody gets it.”
For more information, contact Ken Carloni at ken.carloni@umpqua.edu.
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