In the fall semester I have taught the departmental capstone water course, BENG 4933: Sustainable Watershed Engineering. This course is designed to build on basic hydrologic and hydraulic understanding to examine water use on a landscape scale. We discuss examples of urban, agricultural, and forested systems. The course catalog describes the course as follows:
BENG 4933. Sustainable Watershed Engineering (Fa). 3 Hours.
Provides students with expertise in using advanced tools in watershed monitoring, assessment, and design. Builds on core competencies in hydrology and hydraulics to allow student to evaluate water used by sector in water management regions; evaluate and quantify water demands by sector with emphasis on irrigation; develop risk-based simulations of hydrologic processes, including precipitation, evapo-transportation, infiltration, runoff, and stream flow; quantify and simulate constituent loading to watersheds using GIS-based models, and understand the applications of these methods in water resource management policy. Three hours lecture per week. Prerequisite: CVEG 3223 or BENG 4903.
In spring semesters of even years, I teach the following graduate level course:
BENG 5963/4963: Modeling Environmental Biophysics (Spr). 3 Hours.
Interactions between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Applications in agriculture, landscape planning, and modeling. The physical environment of solar energy, winds, soil, and hydrology will be connected to the biosphere through plant ecophysiology. Introductions to boundary layer meteorology, modeling strategies, and the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. Instrumentation and measurement strategies for understanding leaf-, landscape- and regional behaviors. The course provides a fundamental basis for understanding the transfer, kinetics, and balance of momentum, energy, water vapor, CO2, and other atmospheric trace gases between the landscape (vegetation and soil) and the atmosphere. Applications in sustainable agriculture, irrigation, land and water resources, and various scales of modeling will be considered and explored. Lab and field practice sessions will utilize a learning-by-doing strategy with hands-on immersion in a variety of programing, modeling, and measurement techniques. Primary textbook: Terrestrial Biosphere-Atmosphere Fluxes; Russell Monson, Dennis Baldocchi; 2014
In the May intersession I lead a study abroad course, GENG 3113 “Sustainability in the European Food System” to the University of Ghent, in Belgium. Info about this course is here, through the hogsabroad.uark.edu portal.