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The August 17-25, 2014 offering was the first university course to use the Learning Centre fully--students camped, attended lectures, ate and talked on site. The weather was nearly perfect throughout. We were grateful to the new Galiano Library for providing a research portal with broadband internet.
We repeated the human activity transects, expanding the project to encompass the entire property. This assignment is a twist on usual ecological transects. Instead of recording vegetation, students recorded human features. The aim over time is to track how human use of the site changes, and how land use legacies shape ecological recovery and restoration. Guest lectures included John Volpe (UVic), Tara Martin (CSIRO, Australia), Mike Hoebel (Galiano Naturalist), Mike Keefer (Society for Ecological Restoration--Western Canada), and Jane Wolverton (Galiano Food Program). The course ended with a community feast and student presentations.
Students projects focused on a new food forest for the Learning Centre, ecological restoration and site planning for the new ASPA building, control of reed canary grass, ecoforestry, and a geodatabase of the human activity transect project.
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