A land lab is an area of land that has been set aside for use in biological studies. Thus, it is literally an outdoor laboratory based on an area of land.
Studies may be elementary or advanced. For instance, students may simply be given the task of identifying all the tree species in a land lab, or an advanced student may be doing an intensive survey of the microbial life forms found in a soil sample.
Hands on, tangible, project-base learning is a key aspect of land labs within an educational context. Land labs can exist anywhere with outdoor access: educational campuses, residential neighborhoods, peri-urban settings, urban settings, or even a small courtyard. The driving principle behind land lab education is getting outside and interacting with the world directly.
Land labs are often marked out in plots or transects for studies. A plot may be any size, usually marked out in square meters. This allows for more intensive, delimited studies of changes and inventories of biota. Transects are straight lines at which, at intervals, measurements are taken for a profile of the ecological community.Land labs serve an important role in giving students access to a natural environment to observe native plants and wildlife, apply STEM concepts with hands on projects, and build a better understanding of how critical biodiversity is for ecological health.
Learning to produce food, fiber and energy in sustainable ways is a tremendous opportunity for students of all ages within land labs. Students can explore biomass energy, biogas fuels, solar energy, permaculture, composting, organic gardening, and many other facets of sustainability through land labs.
By designing systems that mimic natural processes (biomimicry), we are able to produce food, fiber, and energy in more sustainable ways for local communities. Numerous environmental and economic benefits exist to growing food locally and producing energy locally. These biomimicry inspired systems are circular in nature. Nothing is wasted, as the outputs of one circular system become the inputs of another.
Circular system experiments, promoting a circular economy, are a natural fit for educational land labs. Circular systems function by ensuring that nothing is wasted. Every output of a system becomes an input for another system.
For example: Food scraps feed chickens, chicken manure fertilizes the garden, the garden grows more vegetables, food scraps are then available from the vegetables to feed chickens.Circular systems that are well-suited for land labs include:
Land labs help to form an ecosystem well suited for long-term project-based learning. Students, teachers, and community members can participate in multi-disciplinary activities ranging from land restoration, animal husbandry, gardening, weather analysis to outdoor art studies.The multi-disciplinary context within a land lab is perfect for cross-curricular education. The following disciplines and subjects can all tie into land lab activities in an integrated fashion:
Land labs exist as perpetual educational projects that can span years to decades or more. Common goals within a land lab are often:
Land labs can be designed in all shapes and sizes. The key attributes of a land lab are typically the following:
A small land lab could be as little as a courtyard, balcony garden, or a designated patch of land outside of a classroom window. Conversely, larger land lab could encompass hundreds of acres. The ideal size for a flexible land lab space allowing for many different ecological activities and circular systems is between 1/4 of an acre to 5 acres.
Land labs are real-life environments by design. The project-based environment encourages students, teachers, and community members to experiment with ecological solutions that can be implemented on a small scale.
Ideally, the solutions and systems implemented in a land lab are transferred beyond the land lab and into the surrounding community. Composting, rainwater catchment, food-waste upcycling with methane digesters and BSF, local food production, harnessing of solar power, and other land lab systems can all be implemented throughout a community at various scales: residential, schools, community gardens, and local businesses.
The purpose of a land lab is to allow students to develop, implement, and learn about practical, sustainable solutions for addressing the five basic physiological needs all humans have:
Our industrial systems of providing food, water, energy, shelter, and sanitation have inherent weaknesses to their centralized models. Long supply chains, fossil-fuel dependance, environmental damage, and the fragmented production of goods are common traits to industrial models. Land labs tie these 5 basic human needs together in integrated systems.
Permaculture is a concept of integrating these human needs into local, ecological, human-scale systems. Land labs can be thought of as an education area for promoting creative solutions for meeting these needs, while ensuring the land and local ecology are being restored in the process.
Land labs provide students with real-world experiences to help change their behavior as consumers, and get them more involved with meeting their 5 physiological needs.
Land labs are focused on production rather than just consumption. Western consumer culture makes the provision of our 5 basic physiological needs very abstract and far removed from the daily life of most people.
When these 5 basic needs are abstracted away from consumers, it is easier for the underlying systems providing these needs to operate without supervision to ensure they are ethical and sustainable.
In today's digital world, many students spend inordinate amounts of time on a screen both at home and at school. Inherent limits exist to project based learning that takes place entirely behind a screen or within a classroom.
Land labs help break students out of a digital environment by providing much needed time outdoors. Studies have shown that as our digital landscape of social media has exploded in popularity, depression and mental struggles have increased dramatically in students.[1]
Studies also show that student's mental health benefits immensely from being outdoors and participating in hands on projects with meaningful outcomes.[2]
Multiple types of local "waste" streams, that can often be obtained freely, can be used to supply a land lab with the raw materials to build soil, generate power, grow food, and restore biodiversity.
Part of the process of building a land lab is developing relationships with local businesses, neighbors, restaurants, and community members to begin upcycling these wastes into the materials and systems needed within a land lab. Many people have a desire to help students who are working hard on a meaningful community project. Much of the materials listed above can be had for little to no cost as relationships are formed.