Outreach

Bringing the science of landscapes and natural hazards to classrooms, communities, and agencies.

Communicating the science of landscapes and natural hazards beyond the university is central to what we do. We partner with schools, community groups, and public agencies across the Sierra Nevada and beyond to share how Earth’s surface works and how natural hazards like floods, debris flows, landslides, and earthquakes shape the places we live.

Much of our outreach centers on hands-on Earth science for young students. Through a long-running partnership with the Sierra Expeditionary Learning School, a K-8 charter school in Truckee, California, we have built and taught units that use sandbox experiments and benchtop landslide flumes to explore landforms, geomorphology, and natural hazards. We also lead field trips that follow the water cycle and its geomorphic record from Lake Tahoe down to Pyramid Lake, the system’s terminal lake. Over the years we have brought similar lessons to elementary classrooms in Colorado and Massachusetts, connecting glacial landscapes, rivers, floods, and plate tectonics to the places students call home.

Students measuring the angle of a miniature landslide flume
Students measuring the runout distance of the landslide deposit
A chalk graph on the playground of landslide runout distance versus flume angle, marked with safe and unsafe zones
An elementary-school activity on landslide hazards: students changed the angle of miniature landslide flumes to see how that changes a landslide's runout distance, and hence its hazard, then graphed the class's results out on the playground.
Students nature-journaling on the bank of the Truckee River
Students exploring a sagebrush-covered bar left by ancient megafloods
Students along the gravel shore of Pyramid Lake
Following the water cycle and its geomorphic record from Lake Tahoe down the Truckee River: students journaling along the river, exploring a bar left by ancient megafloods, and reaching Pyramid Lake, its terminal lake.

We also engage directly with the communities and agencies that manage natural-hazard risk. Recent examples include presenting at the NOAA Flood Preparedness Workshop and the Truckee River Watershed Symposium, delivering a keynote on post-fire debris flows for Watershed University’s program on floodplain management in arid regions, and joining community workshops on flooding after wildfire in Douglas County, Nevada.