The growing human population of the Earth, equipped with ever more powerful technologies, is placing huge and unsustainable demands on natural resources. The complex scientific, social, and political problems posed by the deepening environmental crisis mandate the training of large numbers of professionals able to advance knowledge and implement effective adaptive management to minimize the increasing human impact on the planet. There is great need for courses that bring students with a wide diversity of backgrounds and interests in contact with the natural world, so that they may contribute to making the general public more fully informed of the urgency to manage the life-support systems of the Earth in sustainable ways. By default, such educational and training responsibilities devolve to universities and colleges. Lester Brown in the State of the World in 1995 (The Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C., p.14) summarized as follows the dire consequences of continuing current practices:

The ecological symptoms of unsustainability include shrinking forests, thinning soils, falling aquifers, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, and rising global temperatures. The economic symptoms include economic decline, falling incomes, rising unemployment, price instability, and loss of investor confidence. The political and social symptoms include hunger and malnutrition, and, in extreme cases, mass starvation; environmental and economic refugees; social conflicts along ethnic, tribal, and religious lines; and riots and insurgencies. As stresses build on political systems, governments weaken, losing their capacity to govern and to provide basic services, such as police protection. At this point, the nation-state disintegrates, replaced by a feudal social structure governed by local warlords as in Somalia, now a nation-state in name only.

In 2001, the National Research Council (NRC) issued a report on Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences. Written at the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the report identifies "the most important environmental challenges of the next generation." The eight areas - singled out by applying the criteria of scientific importance, urgency, and scope - were:

• biological diversity and ecosystem functioning
• hydrologic forecasting
• infectious disease and the environment
• land-use dynamics
• biogeochemical cycles
• climate variability
• institutions and resource use
• reinventing the use of materials.

The NRC recommended the first four of these areas for immediate research investments.  The conclusions of the NRC report are in broad agreement with those of numerous other recent assessments by panels of experts.

For a number of years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been supporting the conceptual development of the national and global infrastructure that would gather and integrate the information needed to understand and confront the "grand challenges." The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) will be a U.S. continental-scale research network of long-term ecological observatories "designed to advance under-standing of how ecosystems and organisms respond to variations in climate and changes in land use." The design of NEON was guided by the recommendations of the NRC report. The NSF-sponsored Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science (CUAHSI), an organization representing more than 100 U.S. universities, has the mission to develop infrastructure and services in support of hydrologic science and education in the United States. The Collaborative Large-Scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research (CLEANER) will be "a networked infrastructure of environmental field facilities that enables the formulation and development of engineering and policy options for the restoration and protection of environmental resources." The Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks (ORION) will coordinate an emerging network of science-driven, ocean-observing systems, a marine counterpart of NEON. In parallel, there is a global joint effort of 33 nations, in which the United States is a participant, to create a Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS). The mission of GEOSS was concisely stated in a framework document formulated by an international ad hoc Group on Earth Observations: "[T]he collective effort could be organized to continuously monitor the state of our environment, increase understanding of dynamic Earth processes, and enhance forecasts on our environmental conditions" and "address potential societal benefits if timely, high-quality, and long-term data and models were available to aid decision-makers at every level, from intergovernmental organizations to local government to individuals."

One among the many positive, hoped-for outcomes from the research enabled by the various observatory networks is improved integration of water-resource management. It is estimated that the world's people currently use about 55 percent of the renewable supplies of fresh water, and, even so, a large percentage of us have no access to dependable supplies of fresh water. Another hoped-for outcome is a more sophisticated adaptive approach to climate variability and change. Others include enhanced biodiversity conservation, sustainable land use and management, and much greater public understanding of environmental factors affecting human health and well-being.

In confronting the rapidly expanding need for research and instruction on the environment, the 35 NRS reserves are a priceless resource. The NRS makes relatively undisturbed samples of California's natural ecosystems, and the facilities to support research and teaching, available to students, teachers, and researchers. While other universities and colleges may have one or more sites for fieldwork, none can match the size, scope, and ecological diversity of the NRS.

While working at a reserve, students interact with researchers and staff expert in many different disciplines. This is an important element of the field experience, particularly valuable for graduate students. Most of the major challenges in the environmental sciences and management require multidisciplinary solutions. The NRC report on Grand Challenges in Environmental Sciences strongly emphasizes this point:

Training is particularly important, especially for producing a new generation of interdisciplinary scientists, but also for improving the capabilities of scientists to work effectively in multidisciplinary teams. Universities are generally organized according to traditional disciplines, posing barriers to interdisciplinary research and training. While innovative departments and institutes have been established at some universities, they are still few in the United States. It is still unusual to find a program that trains students in several of the relevant natural science and social science fields.

The distribution of field courses taught at the NRS reserves corresponds well to areas emphasized in the NRC report and in other studies. Examination by discipline of the tabulation of courses (Appendix A) shows the marked dominance of ecology courses. The NRC report highlights the central importance of ecology:

Throughout its history, the field of ecology has focused on understanding the factors that produce and control biological diversity. Success would be a substantial intellectual prize. It would represent a pinnacle of knowledge of the Earth's living systems comparable to the goal of cosmology to discover the events and processes that determine and guide the development of the physical universe. The practical value of such understanding would appear to be inestimable.

The physical sciences are also prominently represented, with courses in climate studies, geology, and geomorphology. These courses, as well as others included under the rubric of environmental management, are directly relevant to meeting the grand challenge of hydrologic forecasting. The ultimate objective here is to be able to predict changes in freshwater resources caused by floods, droughts, sedimentation, and contamination.

The NRC report envisages that:

In meeting this challenge, science would draw on new high-resolution atmospheric, surface, and subsurface data obtained as a result of rapid advances in remote sensing and geophysical technology. Multidisciplinary collaboration, field measurements and experiments, and data integration would enable the development of a new body of hydrologic science, linking traditional hydrology, geomorphology, and aquatic/riparian ecology.

Graduate students at the Angelo Coast Range Reserve
http://nrs.ucop.edu/SP1-Airborne-Laser-Mapping.htm
http://nrs.ucop.edu/SP6-Earth-Surface.htm
http://nrs.ucop.edu/Keck_HydroWatchl.htm
the Sagehen Creek Field Station
http://nrs.ucop.edu/Keck_HydroWatchl.htm
and the James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve
http://nrs.ucop.edu/SP2-Embedded-Sensing.htm
are deeply involved in multidisciplinary research that explores various aspects of the grand challenge of hydrologic forecasting.

The examples given above illustrate the congruence between most NRS reserve-based instruction in the University of California system and areas of critical global concern. Such linkages can readily be demonstrated as well for the remaining courses tabulated in the appendices that follow.