Integrating Spatial Educational Experiences (Isee) Into Crop, Soil, and Environmental Science Curricula.

Many of the concepts that our students must master in our soil, crop, and environmental science curricula are inherently spatial. Although we implicitly acknowledge the existence of spatial patterns in our courses, our ability to explicitly make these spatial patterns clear to our students has been limited. On the other hand, our students need more geospatial skills to understand and address the increasingly complex societal problems that they will be confronted with throughout their careers. The project that we will describe has two goals: (1) Develop the ability of our students to use geospatial information to understand how and why soils and landscapes vary spatially at scales ranging from individual fields to a region as large as the state of Indiana. (2) Develop our students’ understanding as to how the spatial distribution of soils and landscapes impacts the distributions of crops, cropping systems, land use, and environmental and natural resource issues across the state of Indiana. In this presentation, we will first describe Isee, a web-based geographic information system based on Google Earth that allows students to access a large variety of maps (data layers) for any area of Indiana. Then we will briefly describe how we are using Isee to integrate spatial educational experiences into our curricula.