This working repository hosts all lecture material, code, assignments, and the syllabus for Land Use and Water Quality (WR418) taught at Colorado State University.
The long-term vision for this project is to work towards an open access book similar to R for Data Science, which can be used to teach college students about the interaction of human land-use and downstream water quality change.
The broadest goals of the book/course are for students to develop both an intuitive and quantitative understanding of:
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How human decisions about land-use alters how water moves through the landscape, the materials it picks up, and, what we can and can't do to improve degraded water quality.
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The chemical reactions and processes that govern the connection between land-use and downstream water quality, over short and long time-scales.
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The history of human impacts to water quality from water quality impacts in ancient rome to modern pharmaceuticals entering our lakes and rivers.
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The status of water quality in lakes and rivers across the globe and how it relates to legislation, developoment, and environmental change broadly.
To reach these educational goals we will use a variety of approaches focused on engaging students directly with primarily literature on water quality, discussing current events related to land-use and water quality, quantitative analyses of land-use and water quality change over time, and a focused final project.