Early last month, students in Associate Professor Jennifer Minner’s Land Use Planning Methods course presented to the Town of Lansing Conservation Advisory Council. The students presented natural resource and land use maps of Lansing using geographic information systems.
The course is comprised of students in the master of regional planning (MRP) and undergraduate urban and regional studies (URS) programs, as well as graduate students in business and landscape architecture.
This collaborative opportunity came out of the efforts of URS alum Osamu Tsuda ’18, who currently serves as the Outreach & Climate Smart Specialist at the Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE). As a participating community in the program, the Town of Lansing has expressed interest in developing a Natural Resource Inventory. Using a Natural Resource Inventory template and manual created by himself and another CRP student Skye Hart (MRP ’19), Tsuda provided guidance to the students while facilitating communication between the course and the Lansing community.
“We thought it would be great to have CRP students involved in the process as part of a larger institutional effort to better collaborate between CCE and Cornell,” Tsuda said.
Students appreciated the opportunity to discuss their Natural Resource Inventory analysis of the town. “It was a wonderful experience – I learned a lot from the council’s perspective,” said Fan Feng, a graduate student in landscape architecture enrolled in the class. “One councilmember is a professor from Cornell who’s an expert on soils. He gave us many useful comments.”
Minner shared that this experience was an excellent way for her students to apply their land use planning skills to work for a local community as they delved into learning the intricacies of natural resource inventories.