Teaching Soil Physics with Hands-On Laboratory and Field Experiments.

This talk will focus on the connection between theory and practice through experiments, with paradigms from the curriculum in UC Davis, including success and failure examples. Although laboratory and field experiments are time- and effort-consuming, they are truly worth it.

As soil physics instructors, we bring the knowledge across to our students by teaching theory and practice. Today, students from a broad range come to our classroom, such as from hydrology, geology, ecology, soil mechanics, sedimentology, botany and agronomy. While we acknowledge the importance of soil physics for students of diverse majors, and are interested in this outreach, at the same time we experience that for many of them it is much easier to achieve the principle understanding of an observable physical phenomena rather than quantifying it with mathematical equations for a fuller comprehension. Through laboratory and field experiments, the connection of observation to theory is made.

The lectures provide the theoretical background; with following homework assignments and discussion meetings to practice solution to problems, whereas the lab sessions combine theory and hands-on experience of the topics taught in class. During our 3-hour weekly laboratory-field session, we conduct relatively simple experiments that can be easily modeled, and include comparisons between models and experiments, including inverse optimization. The experiments augment the major topics in soil physics. We spend our initial sessions to set up long-term experiments, which continue during the entire course and provide the key principles of soil physics: measurement of retention curve and properties of unsaturated flow. Apart from these two main topics, experimental sessions include: measurement techniques, infiltration and sorptivity, gas diffusion, air permeability, saturated hydraulic conductivity, solute transport, and thermal properties and flux.