Students Examine Soil and its Co-Evolution with Civilization in Scotland

In May of 2011, nine students and two faculty traveled to the Midlands and Highlands of Scotland as part of an embedded course to examine how Scottish history has changed soil, and thus its civilization. This 3 cr. on-campus and study abroad course (SOILS 497A) was based out of Stirling.

The program began with an introduction to the region by trip and course leader Patrick Drohan, and Co-trip leader Katherine Butler, both of the Dept. of Crop and Soil Sciences. During the field course students were reminded of how people shaped Scotland's landscape as civilization developed, and in turn how the soil and climate shaped what could be done with the land. A major focus of the course was how the study of soil and archeology together can be used to discern past cultural practices (geoarchaeology).

Central to the success of the course was the collaboration of faculty from Stirling University's Geoarchaeology and Environmental History Research Cluster. Drs. Clare Wilson and Donald Davidson led students on a walk and exploration across part of the Highlands at Menstrie Glen converted to sheep farming during the Highland Clearances. Students were able to examine soil profiles, interpret historic landscape patterns in walls and ruins, and conduct field chemical tests to detect human habitation. Later that day, students were able to explore Stirling's amazing thin section slide collection using petrographic microscopes and a scanning electron microscope.

Many Scottish government agencies also graciously hosted student visits. Students received a lecture on the role of Historic Scotland in protection Scotland's historic legacy, along with a fabulous tour of Stirling Castle from Mr. Noel Fojut of Historic Scotland. In addition, students toured Holyrood Park in Edinburgh with Adrian Cox of Historic Scotland, and later visited the historic city of Edinburgh.

Students visited different areas of the Loch Lomond and Trossach's National Park (LLTNP) to study forestry, agriculture, wildlife and people management practices. One highlight of this tour was a visit with Linda Winskill of LLTNP to a large wetland rehabilitation project focused on nesting birds and nearby hill forts. Later in the week the students met met with LLTNP staff Kenny Auld, Gareth Kett, and Tim Messer for a discussion of park policy and landscape development around Callander. This day's activities were highlighted by a scenic walk above Callander, and a visit to the fort that the fabled Roman 9th legion left from. Students discussed the role of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) with Mr. Mark Aiken of SEPA, and compared it to the US Environmental Protection Agency.

The importance of agricultural through Scotland's history was highlighted with visits to a living history museum with a replica Crannog and demonstrations of daily life activities (fire building, wood working, etc.) students could practice. The Crannog pictured left is truly an amazing structure. Built out over the water of one of Scotland's Lochs, the structure provided security, easy disposal of waste, access to food, and a very pleasant ambient sound with the lapping waves against the shore.

In contrast, students visited with Dr. Tony Waterhouse at the Scottish Agricultural College in the Highlands at Kirkton to discuss modern sheep rearing. Much of the research now conducted at the research farm is focused on sheep rearing, and landscape management practices to benefit sheep and protect the land. This visit contrasted nicely with the visit earlier in the week to the Highland Clearance property in Menstrie Glen (also a product of sheep management policy over a hundred years prior).

Penn State Soil Judging Takes 6th in Group Judging at 51st National Contest

Over the week of April 27, the Penn State Soil Judging team took 6th place in "group judging" (out of 22 teams) at the 51st National Collegiate Soil Judging Contest in Bend, Oregon. The contest consists of two events, "individual judging" and "group judging". In individual judging, students work alone to describe the morphology, classify, and interpret land use suitability of three different soils. In group judging, the whole team works together to evaluate 2 different soil profiles.

The team consisted of students Kathryn Clark, Elizabeth Dannerth, John Driscoll, Kyle Medash, Stephen Rhodes, and Austin Young. Stephen Rhodes finished the highest for Penn State in individuals at 34th out of 84 students.

This year's contest saw quite an extreme variability in weather. By the start of the contest Friday morning, approximately 2 inches of snow had fallen at the contest site. This in contrast to the beautiful sunny and 60 F weather students had for the group judging event Saturday. More than 100 students competed in the contest.

Prior to the contest, students practiced on soil profiles in the region of the contest site. In addition, the Penn State students took advantage of a tour of the surrounding Bend area, which started at the top of Mt. Bachelor Ski Area.

A special thanks for running the contest to Ron Reuter at OSU-Cascades Campus, and Jay Noller and Will Austin of the Crop and Soil Sciences Dept. at Oregon State Univ. in Corvallis.

The contest received some great press. An article was featured in the Bend Bulletin in which Penn State team member Austin Young is quoted, and which also featured current Penn State graduate student in Soil Science Michael Marsicano (who competed for Delaware Valley College).

Two TV stations also covered the contest. One of the clips has Stephen Rhodes (Penn State) in it several times.

http://www.ktvz.com/video/27734154/index.html

http://news.opb.org/

Penn State Soil Judger wins NOAA Hollings Scholarship

This Spring, ERM major (soil science option) Kathryn Clark (pictured in the center of this photo) was notified that she won the NOAA Hollings Scholarship. The scholarship was created in 2005 to honor Senator Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina. Its purpose is to encourage undergraduate students to pursue research in oceanic and atmospheric sciences, promote environmental literacy, and prepare students for government careers in the natural sciences and in science education. The awards provides undergraduates with up to $8000 a year for two years of study and a internship between junior and senior years with a stipend of $6500. The internship will be at a NOAA facility and will involve a research project while working with a NOAA mentor. The student will then present their project at a NOAA conference following the internship.

Kathryn says, "the internship can be with any of the NOAA organizations, and the one I hope to work with is the National Marine Fisheries Service. The Fisheries Service includes coastal habitat management such as protection of biodiversity in estuaries and coastal wetlands, as well as protection of marine species such as whales and sea turtles. I will be offered a variety of internship opportunities to choose from in Fall 2011. There are science centers everywhere from Maine to Hawaii that I can chose from."

Congratulations Katie!

Heinz Endowments awards Marcellus Shale research grant to Penn State

University Park, Pa. — The Heinz Endowments recently awarded a team of Penn State researchers a $412,000, three-year, grant to identify and mitigate the effects of Marcellus Shale natural gas exploration and development on the forest ecosystem. The interdisciplinary research team, led by Margaret Brittingham, professor of wildlife resources, and Patrick Drohan, assistant professor of pedology, both faculty members in the College of Agricultural Sciences, also will develop land management practices and a monitoring program to reduce the Marcellus disturbance footprint.
http://live.psu.edu/story/50857

SOILS 497A: Final trip components in place for the students

The final aspects of the study abroad program are in place. Today I met with staff of the Scottish Agricultural College, SAC and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, SEPA. SAC is a pay version of the US Cooperative Extension service, which in this region, has an experimental farm NW of Stirling.

I also drove around a bit today trying to get my bearings and to scout some other locations nearby for the class. It was the first real rainy day and quite nice. I had lunch at an inn up by the Trossachs. Afterwards I traveled to a woolen mill for some gifts for the family.

Earlier in the day I met one of Donald's PhD students, Kirsty Golding, a visiting soil scientist from China and his wife, and Clare Wilson to speak about potential research collaborations. One very interesting feature found in some of the anthropogenic soils here is a horizon of phytoliths resembling an E horizon. Clare had some thin section slides of the feature that I was able to get some images of for teaching.

Tomorrow I fly back to the United States to get ready for The NE Cooperative Soil Survey Meeting in Rhode Island next week. Bit o' travel.

Yesterday, Donald and his wife Caroline gave me a fabulous tour of the Trossachs west of Stirling. We stopped a Doune Castle where some of the Monty Python movies have been made and then drove on to visit the Woodland Trust near Callander. We next drove to Loch Katrine and had lunch along the shore. This was quite a spectacular spot. We left here and drove to David Marshall Lodge and then to Aberfoyle where I was able to meet with some of the Forestry Commission staff. Afterwards we drove to the new Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park HQ to set up a meeting for the students and were lucky enough to receive superb tour of the facility. The building is the largest timber frame structure in the UK. On the way back to Dunblane we paid a stop at the gardens of Ross Priory on the Loch. More later...

SOILS 497A: Stirling..finding student accomodations and examining the city

Today, my primary goal was to scout the city and the accommodations for students. The two options for the students are the housing in a campus dorm or the youth hostel. The Hostel is downtown by the old jail and down the hill from Stirling castle. The dorm is nearby to town and grocery as well (John Forty's Court).

Stirling is a very old city with an extremely important location in Scotland due to being a corrider near a river and the Highlnds and lowlands. It was not bombed in WWII and thus it's buildings are largely intact.

A highlight of my walk up the hill was Stirling Castle, which was the most strategic castle for many tears in Britain and home to Robert the Bruce.

My work that morning as involved meeting with some of the staff and students of the micromorphology laboratory at Stirling. This was for my own benefit as a researcher since I have received little training in this important area of soil science; I am self taught. What I did learn during this meeting was immensely helpful and will be very beneficial to my lab's work. A special thanks to George MacLeod for spending so much time with me.

SOILS 497A: The end of the training and back to Dunblane

Today started off with the training group meeting at "Rogie" on Forestry Commission land. The goal today was to teach the group about sampling and the various complications that one must deal with spatially and temporally. Rogie is an old settlement with a paddock (called a kale yard), grain dryer, and various outbuildings. Clare and Donald spoke about sampling and then broke the group up into two teams to sample the kale yard with soil cores and a shallow pit to the bottom of the anthropogenic soil. The teams then took various measures such as depth of the anthro soil, color, phosphorus content, pH (or Ph over here), and field texture. From this information they made inferences about land usage. It was quite amazing how much organic matter had accumulated in such a small area.

After we completed the work at Rogie, we had a bag lunch nearby overlooking the valley and then drove to Braemore (near Auchindrean) for the second stop. This stop is a mixed use site with Bronze Age to Victorian area structures. Again, the group was broken up into teams and we worked on this fluvial glacial terrace taking cores and describing the soils. As compared to Rogie, one noticeable difference was the phosphorus spike throughout th site...quite high.

Donald's brother in-law was arriving for a few days that day for dinner at 7PM so we left at 3:30PM to be back in time. The drive back was quite nice and I did some filming of the drive with the MacBook. I will see if I can put it up. Quite frankly I was exhausted, yet enjoyed the scenery. We drove by the area of the last G8 summit (Glen Eagles) and then returned to Dunblane in record time thanks to Clare's able driving! Caroline's brother is a retired police officer from London and her sister in-law is very talented geneologist. She is here doing more work on their family tree in Edinburgh while in route to their vacation home north of here.

Well off to bed. The dinner was great and the port mellow. Tomorrow Stirling.

SOILS 497A: Saturday training

Training on Saturday for SASSA went very well. Thee were about 20 individuals from a regional Scottish Archaeological club. One happened to be the man who invented tree shelters when he was a graduate student at the Univ. of Aberdeen in the 1960's (Tulle).

We met first in a community center to receive an overview of soils an archeology from Donald and then the specifics on SASSA from Clare. Then Clare had set up petrographic scopes for the students to examine thin sections with.

Then we headed out to the field sites we had selected on Friday. The first we visited was the podzol over the fragipan. This was a very large and clear profile that allowed them to see an example of a typical natural soil. This is important for them to see so that they can then compare to an anthropogenic soil. I was impressed with the questions and was able to lead part of discussion on fragipans at this site.

We then travelled to an area where we had varying types of soils on a catena. A well-drained upland soil (podzol) , a wet soil (gley they call it), and a soil in a ruin that was an area of deep soil building. At this last spot we went over the basics of auguring with a dutch auger, field texturing and color. At the gley soil we went over an indicator for reduced iron called alpha-alpha Dipyridyl .

I was also able to take a sample of the organic lamallae. We talked quit a bit about this and now believe it is an inverted turf of some kind. It will still be interesting to look at.

We wrapped up near 6PM and the group headed home to meet again Sunday. The three of us headed over to Dingwell to pick up some lunch items for Sunday (cheese, bread, fruit). The we headed back to have dinner. Again we went to the Red Poppy and had a great meal. Afterwards we visited the three local pubs. One was a true local's place and the other two were tour bus pubs where the mean age of the visitors was about 80. Running out of time...more later.

SOILS 497A: Organic lamallae, bronze age ruins and ticks

We are in Strathpeffer for Thur, Fri and Sat night (my great B&B) and head back Sunday night to Stirling.

Today we started out with our guide for the day crawling down a manhole for a stormwater drain to grab a bunch of naturally accumulating yellow boy from the area aquifer. It precipitates out at the drain exit creating a wonderful red/orange slop. This was also right next to his garden that had the biggest strawberry plants I have ever seen. No connection though you can be sure..the strawberries are the product of years of experience from his former career as a farmer and great looking compost. He also happens to compost everything…even soils.

We also visited areas where resettlement projects took place in the 1800's tht resukted in small subsistence farm operations called crofts. These were very obvious over by Loch Ussie (below image).

Sat. I am helping with a regional training for a soils instructional schematics that Stirling has developed to assist archaeologists in describing soils. It is called SASSA and would be of great use in the United States. The program on Sat. is being run for regional hobby archaeologists (you would think they are professionals with the knowledge and experience though).

Our regional guide who has been instrumental in setting up the program with Stirling on Sat. was a fabulous guide of the history of the area. We looked at ruins extending from Bronze age settlements to the Victorian. Many of these have been greatly disturbed by regional forestry planting operation that used D9 Caterpillar sized dozer with giant chisel on the back to rip a fragipan that extends across many areas of the region. Operators of the units were not from the region and often drive right through the ruins as tey were plowing the area before tree planting. The result in the area has been severe disturbance to many old ruins. Today this does not happen since firms are required to hire an archaeologist to flag ruins prior to operations.

The amount of organic material in the region is amazing. No wonder plants grow so well here. Fabulously rich soils with wonderful loam to sandy loam textures.

Wow...we saw organic lamallae today. Very cool for a soil scientist. These are waves of organic material that have moved down through a sandy soil material in sharp demarcations. Very pretty and interesting.

One of the evening stops did result in me picking off 70 nasty little ticks that might harbor lymes disease. Yes they have it here too. So I have been double checking the last several hours and all clear so far.

Today we spent time near Loch Ussie. The area is encompassed by typical glacial dead ice topography so one will see eskers, fluvial drainage channels, etc. In the area to we saw an old craggen (man made small island in a Loch as a defense), a vitrified wall (right) that was part of a fort (the wall was fired wood and stone). The wall was really interesting. I posed a method of creation that they had not heard of before and thought might work. The wall was first built of stones and timbers and then somehow burnt so hot that the material turned to slag. In Pennsylvania we see this a lot near our old furnaces. I thought that perhaps the people had packed the walls with charcoal on the out side and then fired the structure to get the temperatures high enough to create the virtification. One for the Mythbusters! You heard it here first though.

Dinner was back in town this evening at the Red Poppy. Very tasty lamb and fried brie with some Chilean cabernet. Not bad after the chilly Highlands…perhaps not the stuff of Sean Connery but who said I was Sean Connery. Off to find Conner MacCloud of the clan MacCloud…

SOILS 497A: The, drive, the flight, the arrival

Reached the airport on May 20th to find that my flight had been canceled due to storms. I would be delayed at least a day....

As an alternative, US Airways got me a British Airways flight out of Dulles. I then rented a cae from the State College Airport and drove to Dulles. Got there about 1 and found a hotel room. Slept for three hours and got up at 4:30 to get to the airport.

It was a nice surprise to find out that the US Airways attendant had switched me also to Business class! Posh, comfortable....while I would never be able to afford to fly that way on my own, I highly recommend it. Unfortunately I fly back on US Airways.

I reached Edinburgh at 10:45 PM on the 21st to find my bag was still at Heathrow. Apparently you are supposed to completely exit, pick up your bag, and go back through and chenck in with British Midlands to continue WITH your bag. Due to security BMI will not load a bag not loaded by a passenger. So it was my fault my bag did not make it. Arrggghhh.

So I was lucky enough to get my trusty rental (Chech Skoda now made by VW) and dove to Stirling. Practiced with the lefty manual in the airport lot awhile and then threw myself into the roundabout lost. Drove around it once, twice, and then pulled into the Hilton to get directions. Finally made it to Donald's house in Dunblane (north of Stirling) at 12:30 AM on the 22...night.

Next day I met Donald's wife who was a former school teacher in Dunblane. She no works at a day care in town. Interesting story about the arab land owners later. The gardens at their house are magnificent. Photos later. They are also cat owners!

Donald gave me a briefing on the area soils and geomorphology after breakfast (I got up at 9:30AM), checked on my bag that was arriving in Edinburgh at 12 PM. and then we went on a driving tour east of Dunblane and Stirling to look at some of the areas of the Flander's Moss.

The bag was supposed to be delivered to the house that afternoon before we left, but I could not get an exact time from the delivery service so I eneded up driving to Edinburgh to pick up my bag. Finally we were reunited! Upone arriving back in Dunblane, I drove up above Donald's house and saw a large pheasant and a pair of lapwings near the Sheriffmuir Inn.

SOILS 497A: Strathpeffer

Pulled into Strathpeffer late last night (9:30PM and the sun was still up) after having driven up from Stirling. We are here for an archeology training that Clare Wilson is heading up. Clare is a new hire at Stirling who will replace Dr. Davidson. She was also one of his former students.

Weather here is similar to PA.

SOILS 497A: Maps are made and the flight is tonight

15:30 EST: So the maps are made and I leave tonight for Stirling's soils on US Airways...first time on a non-UK airline overseas. I have heard the no-frills horror stories...fingers crossed. Looking forward to setting up the exchange program and working in the lab with Dr. Donaldson.

Envirothon was today...DID IT RAIN. Nevertheless it was fun and I believe the teachers enjoyed the event. Whether the students did???
See our stuff.