Exceptional Resources, Exceptional Education
With our focus on using scientific knowledge to solve real-world, practical problems, our department utilizes a wide variety of specialized facilities, equipment and technology to enhance your education. These resources, combined with our hands-on, immersive approach, provide you with the experience and skills needed to succeed in your future career.
Our 12,000-square-foot Greenhouse Complex is a hands-on laboratory setting, particularly for horticulture classes and some crop science classes, as well as students doing independent undergraduate research. We have a greenhouse plant collection that is a journey through the tropics, desert, bog and fern forest and contains a variety of aquatics, succulents, bryophytes, ferns, orchids and woody plants that are used for teaching. When a more highly-controlled environment is needed for complex and sensitive research, we have multiple growth chambers allowing you to simulate and maintain specific environmental parameters.
The three acre Horticulture and Agronomy Outdoor Teaching plots include a teaching orchard, vineyard, small fruit collection, herbaceous perennial collection, rose collection, agronomy field plot, forage grasses and legumes plots. When there is the need to scale up an agronomy project, our Mann Valley Farm - dedicated to production agriculture - is just 2.5 miles northwest of campus.
A tissue culture lab in the Ag Sciences building provides a sterile environment where we can propagate genetically identical plants from cells or tissue. The lab houses biotechnology tools, including a PCR instrument to generate copies of plant DNA segments for genetic testing and disease diagnosis in molecular breeding.
Our conservation classes make use of the greater campus, often holding class outdoors. In conjunction with the Ecological Restoration Institute, they help to manage our two school forests, our new Wildflower Farm and are converting an open field on campus to a native plant prairie. They spend time in the South Fork of the Kinnickinnic River that runs through campus to study the restoration of aquatic systems.
Students in the department also frequently participate in service learning projects with community groups, helping with conservation projects and management plans for area school district, county and local government forests and parkland. Each year students have an opportunity to expand their knowledge of conservation issues beyond the Midwest by spending a few weeks in the Bahamas, working with the Bahamian Forestry Unit on tropical restoration projects in the Bahamian pine forest, mangrove, scrub forests and more.
Our classes make use of many local lakes, rivers, farms and other natural areas and we have the equipment and tools in our analytical lab on campus to analyze the samples we collect in the field in-house.
Our analytical lab consists of two main spaces, one that supports the processing and analysis of solid samples (soil, manure, compost, plant, food, animal tissue/bone, etc.) and the other that supports processing and analysis of liquid samples (water, extracts and digestate from soil, plant, animal tissue etc.). Whether we need to process a few samples or a large batch, our lab is equipped to meet the needs of our classes and students and faculty engaged in research projects. The analytical lab is a collaborative space and the equipment is also available for use by students and staff in other areas such as animal science, food science and engineering.
Noteworthy instrumentation includes:
Lachat: Ideal for analyzing nutrients and contaminants in water and soil.
UV-Vis Spectrophotometer: Measures how much UV and visible light a sample absorbs, helping determine concentrations of substances.
Flame Photometer: Analyzes the concentration of potassium (K) or sodium (Na), useful for plant and soil samples.
Elementar: Uses combustion to measure carbon (C), nitrogen (N), hydrogen (H) and sulfur (S) in a single sample, providing detailed elemental analysis.
TOC Analyzer: Measures total organic carbon (TOC), inorganic carbon (TIC) and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in samples, crucial for understanding organic matter content in liquid samples.
XRF (X-ray Fluorescence): Offers non-destructive elemental analysis to determine the composition of various materials.
We have an extensive collection of rocks, minerals, fossils and meteorites from around the world and we have the tools to help analyze them, including rock cutting saws (24-inch slab saw and 8-inch trim saw), a grinder, sonic cleaner and a PetroThin thin section machine and petrographic microscopes. Thin sections of rocks are used to help characterize the type of rock, identify minerals in rocks and better understand their history.
Our students spend a great deal of time outside the lab, investigating and exploring the geology of natural settings, visiting local and regional caves, mines, meteor impact sites, area state parks and national parks in the upper Midwest, including the Badlands and the Black Hills. The geology program also organizes field trips to different regions of the U.S. to explore geology outside of the upper Midwest.
We regularly excavate soil pits on our Mann Valley Farm, highlighting the diverse geologic history and soils of this region. The farm is in a region adjacent to the driftless area where thin glacial sediments from both the northwest and northeast parts of North America cover bedrock uplands and valleys. We like to think the hard work of our students, coupled with some of our unique soils, is what has contributed to the UWRF team's frequent first-place finishes in intercollegiate soil judging competitions. We also have extensive field equipment for assessing soil quality: automated infiltrometers, digital penetrometer, LiCOR 8100 gas flux equipment and bulk density corer.
