Undergraduate Environmental Sciences 2023-2024

Field based course that takes you across northeast Scotland exploring an ancient tropical rainforest, hill farming in action, survey techniques and soil formation.

Lectures focus on how soils form, how soils work, soil classification, soil as part of the environment, human impacts on soil, and the use of mapping and soil data to optimise the management of this fragile resource.

Your assessments are geared towards developing practical skills. This includes a presentation on a particular soil that requires research akin to detective work, quizzes on soil properties and classification and a critical essay on a selected topic.

The mixture of applied science and theoretical work on this course places you in a valuable position for understanding the procedures and applications in modern environmental science.

A number of laboratory classes allows you to familiarise yourself with the current analytical instrumentation in environmental science.

The course uses examples of environmental issues allowing you to understand the problem, how the analysis was conducted and the implications of the results. The main assessment in this course is a practical write up that is written in the style of a scientific report giving you an opportunity to perfect this style of writing.

This highly interactive course explores the principles and practice of contaminated land assessment and remediation. It provides broad knowledge of underlying science, as well as practical skills related to the assessment of contamination sources, pathways and risks to human health. While the lectures introduce theoretical background and gradually build the expertise, the practical have been based on various assessment tools and develop practical knowledge and quantitative skills. The learning activities replicate tasks that one would encounter in environmental consultancy and provide valuable transferrable skills.

The course provides background information about the origins and development of Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) process, and its implementation in the UK and elsewhere. It also highlights the significance of impacts associated with selected developments addressed in detail in seminars. The lectures and seminars are supported by workshop sessions focusing on case studies and providing insights into the issues that arise during the EIA. The course also provides an opportunity to develop transferrable skills valued by employers, such as team-working, time-management, communication of science, and critical appraisal. Throughout the course you will work with genuine EIA materials utilised during different stages of the EIA process, to identify likely environmental effects, judge their significance, and propose how they should be assessed and mitigated.