On Oct. 23–25, Jim Benes, a lecturer in the School of Global Integrative Studies (SGIS), took his "Geography 298: Undergraduate Research" students on a coring trip to Valentine National Wildlife Refuge.
In Geography 298, Benes provides a general overview of how science works before delving into how to find research and publish a paper. The course then centers on a research project focused on a specific sediment core.
"In this class, we first discuss how to read and understand scientific literature. Then we talk about lab processes and procedures that the students will undertake," Benes said.
He believes in cultivating curiosity and facilitating learning outside of the classroom. The goal of the trip was to help his students understand the need for resiliency and teamwork in the field while increasing their landscape literacy.
"Coring is a process that involves a drilling device of some kind, approximately 2-6 inches in diameter, that plunges into sediment at the bottom of a lake or marsh," Benes said. "That sediment is brought back to campus to be split, measured, and analyzed to help grasp past environmental change of that specific area. An Earth core can be like a history book of that specific location’s past."
Valentine National Wildlife Refuge in the Nebraska Sandhills offers 71,516 acres of protected prairie grass and wetlands perfect for hands-on learning and coring.
Benes has a personal passion for this type of scientific inquiry. After completing his geography degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Benes earned his master's degree at Montana State University-Bozeman, where he studied paleoecology using lake sediment cores to reconstruct past vegetation and fire history.
Taking his students to the refuge was a full-circle moment, as he had published his dissertation research on cores collected in the Nebraska Sandhills. The group included Spring 2026, Fall 2026, and Spring 2027 Geography 298 students who were excited to visit the area and conduct fieldwork related to Benes's previous findings: Ally Truax, Jayden Schweers, Mars Adam, Riley Lingenfelter, Tucker Smith, and Yashvi Patel.
The UNL team was joined by John Wendt of New Mexico State University, who brought all the gear and helped with the research design and implementation, and Gerry Steinauer of Nebraska Game and Parks, who lent his expertise to the expedition. Additionally, Juancarlos Giese, Mel Nenneman, and Bella Hautala of the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge hosted the team and shared a wealth of knowledge about the landscape.
Because of the forecasted weather when they arrived on Friday, part of the team quickly built the vessel Wendt brought and headed out on Dewey Lake to begin coring at the deepest level. Despite the cold and wind, the team secured two cores using a Bolivia corer and a short core using a new gravity corer.
The rest of the team stayed ashore with Nenneman, a biologist, and took part in a vegetation survey. Jayden Schweers, a current Geography 298 student, shared how the experience strengthened his landscape literacy.
"I did not know there were as many different species of vegetation in the Sandhills as there are," he said. "I always thought of the Sandhills as having maybe around 10 different species of vegetation; however, there are so many more species."
On Saturday morning, the team extruded the short core from Dewey Lake into one-centimeter subsamples at the research bunkhouse on the refuge. Then on Steinauer's suggestion, they headed to Ballard Lake north of the refuge, where they secured another short core. After extruding that core and having lunch, they headed to Clear Lake in the afternoon.
But stronger winds created whitecaps and made conditions too rough for coring. They decided to head back to Dewey Lake, where the surface was calmer, and spent several hours successfully coring, retrieving an approximately 4.5-meter-long core with a Livingstone corer.
Schweers, who is working on a core in the lab this semester, found collecting cores in the field especially impactful.
"I learned a lot more than I thought I would about the process," he said. "It helped to show the steps between the sediment being in the ground and it being in the lab."
The students also gained an appreciation for the resilience required to overcome challenging weather during fieldwork and strengthened their teamwork skills as they battled the elements to accomplish their goal.
"It was cold and windy every day," Schweers said. "If someone was too cold, they could go warm up while others took over, and that helped with the workload."
Sunday morning, the team packed up, cleaned the bunkhouse, and headed back to campus to place the five secured cores in refrigerated storage in Bessey Hall.
"The whole goal of the research is to use the sediment cores to find out what the landscape has looked like in the past and how it's changed over time," Tucker Smith, who took Geography 298 this past spring, said. "Being out on the water, or seeing the hills, the research gets into your awareness, and you start to think about how the landscape has changed, and how you can tell through the land. The Earth keeps its own archive underneath the surface, and we're just tapping into it."
For Smith, a powerful part of the trip was that awareness and spending time with his lab mates, Benes, and the experts who supported the excursion.
"Getting to work as a team together to get these cores and have fun while doing it, even though hungry, cold, and tired, formed some wordless feeling that tied us all together," Smith said. "Coming back to Lincoln, I felt changed."
