Preparation for Upcoming Events

After a brief introduction on our client in our last blog post, we thought we’d take a deeper look into UBC SEEds and its background, purpose, values, and goals. UBC SEEDS (Social Ecological Economic Dvelopment Studies) Program began in 2000 as a result of UBC’s Greening the Campus initiative that ran from 1994 to 1998. Few Universities in North America have a similar program, as UBC SEEDS is Western Canada’s first operational program to integrate student participation with faculty and staff experience on sustainability.

This program provides students with sustainability experience as they work with faculty and staff to create projects that address current, real-life sustainability issues. In addition, UBC SEEDS possesses a student library that holds over 800 student reports regarding sustainability. Students can gain course credit, and faculty and staff get the opportunity to apply actual sustainability issues in a classroom setting and actively contribute to UBC’s movement towards sustainability.

According to UBC SEEDS official website, the projects developed by members of the program have specific criteria and goals as follows:

  1. Involve collaboration between UBC staff, faculty, and students
  2. Involve a real-life, operational sustainability issue at UBC
  3. Contribute to academic credit for students

Additionally, the website states: “The SEEDS Program gives UBC staff members, faculty members and students an opportunity to help advance the University’s commitment to sustainability on campus through meaningful collaborations”.

Source: http://www.sustain.ubc.ca/courses-teaching/seeds (Feb. 1st, 2013)

       Lindsay has been keeping in touch with our main contact, Brenda Sawada, and has set up a defined meeting date. Due to conflicts in schedule with our team and client, our first meeting will not take place until Wednesday, Feb. 6th. Until then, Brenda has recommended we take a look at a previous SEEDS project with similar goals, outlined below.

       Our meeting next week will include a tour of the site, detatiled description of the project, and a meet and greet with Brenda as well as the Garden Director, Patrick Lewis, and the Associate Director and Curator of Collections, Douglas Justice. According to Brenda, our meeting should take about an hour, and we plan to take extensive notes and bring a camera along for further documentation. We look forward to the meeting, and plan to gather ahead of time to determine any questions we may have before extensive work on this project officially commences.

Since our group is scheduled to meet with our client next week, the information we have on the project is still not compete. However, after some research, we found that there has already been some similar work done at the site. A previous group of UBC Civil Engineering Students have determined that it was feasible to install two rock weirs in West Creek and Rock Creek. In a second phase of that project, the two weirs were installed and data about the water levels was recorded. I would imagine that we are continuing their work or looking to impalement more weirs at other creeks. This previous project could provide valuable information pertaining to our own project.

The flowing graph shows the results of a previous project report.

Source:http://sustain.ubc.ca/sites/sustain.ubc.ca/files/seedslibrary/UBC%20Botanical%20Garden%20Stormwater%20Management%20Project_UP.pdf (Feb. 1st, 2013)

 

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