‘It’s a special outdoor classroom’: UK Robinson Forest Field Day demonstrates flash flooding modules for local youth
CLAYHOLE, Ky. (Nov. 20, 2025) — More than 60 middle school and high school students from Breathitt and Letcher counties were invited to learn about the factors influencing flash flooding at Robinson Forest, a 14,800-acre forest in the Cumberland Plateau and home to some of the least disturbed watersheds in Eastern Kentucky.
Part of the Robinson Center and administered by the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources (FNR) at the University of Kentucky Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment (CAFE), the Robinson Forest’s Flooding in Appalachian Streams and Headwaters (FLASH) Field Day 2025 provided students interactive learning stations, led by engineers and researchers at UK and other universities, demonstrating simple techniques to better understand flooding.
Throughout the day, students rotated through interactive learning stations which included hydrology and aquatic biology; meteorology and climatology; dendrology and soils; and a community resource fair.
The fair provided several workforce development and community engagement opportunities, including the Breathitt County Emergency Management, Breathitt County Extension Office, Buckhorn Lake State Park, Forestry Works, Green Forest Work, Kentucky 4-H Youth Development, Kentucky Division for Air Quality, Kentucky Division of Water, Kentucky Forest Leadership Program and Watts-Caney Fire Department.
For Lee Moser, FNR senior agriculture Extension associate, part of the soil and water Extension quality team at Martin-Gatton CAFE and one of the event organizers, the FLASH field day was an ideal way to show youth engaging field monitoring techniques to better address flooding “right in their backyard.”
“This was an opportunity for us and the students to distill the impact of flooding to an eighth-grade level — making science fun and connecting them with nature right here at Robinson Forest, which is close to their neighborhood,” Moser said. “It was amazing to see the students engage with the stations and get their hands in the soil and in the water — that’s the best way to learn.”
Katherine Bullock, FNR soil and water Extension educator at Martin-Gatton CAFE and one of the event organizers, believes that Robinson Forest offers students a truly unique outdoor learning experience and is grateful for all the volunteers and organizations that made this event possible.
“Robinson Forest is a special university resource used for research, teaching and outreach,” Bullock said. “Our team was thrilled to collaborate with university faculty, on-site staff and the local community — hosting a truly memorable field day for local students located in Eastern Kentucky, and giving them the chance to learn from experts and experience the excitement of environmental science firsthand.”
FLASH Initiative
Over the last two decades, extreme rainfall has been a disruptor in rural communities and damaged critical infrastructure, including many areas of the central Appalachian region.
To address this challenge, the initiave, titled “The Flooding in Appalachian Streams and Headwaters (FLASH) Initiative: Mitigating Impacts of Climate Change and Flash Flooding in Appalachia,” involves researchers from UK, University of Louisville, Eastern Kentucky University, Marshall University and West Virgina University. It is supported by a four-year $580,000 U.S. National Science Foundation grant.
The project’s goals are to advance the understanding of flash floods in disturbed and forested stream systems, facilitate community-engaged research, increase the resilience and adoption of flash flood technology and develop an education model for increasing knowledge of flash floods — focusing on communities and youth in Central Appalachia.
For Kenton Sena, Ph.D., one of the FLASH Initiative’s co-principal investigators and senior lecturer in the UK Lewis Honors College, the field day event was a “transformative” experience for the students.
“The students were able to see, feel, smell and hear things that they might otherwise only experience through screens or pages of textbooks in a classroom,” Sena said. “Getting students out of the classroom into their lived world and training them to notice and wonder about their space and the other beings that live there can open up new worlds to them.”
Cody Napier, a Breathitt County middle school teacher, has been collaborating with the FLASH project team to co-develop a curriculum for his eighth-grade science class and helped coordinate the group of students that attended the FLASH Field Day event.
For Napier, the event was an opportunity for his students to get out of the classroom, have fun and bring something valuable home.
“I believe the field day at the Robinson Forest was a great success,” Napier said. “It really drove home the idea that these students don’t have to go far away to get a good job that can help the community in this area. They also really enjoyed getting out of the classroom and being active outdoors.”
In the future, the project has plans to extend the co-developed middle school curriculum with partners into more outdoor learning opportunities — like the FLASH Field Day 2025 event.
The team is hopeful that the FLASH Initiative will establish new academic pathways and programs for more middle and high schoolers, creating a deeper appreciation for geoscience and natural resources in Appalachia and beyond.
“This hands-on outdoor experience not only reinforced key concepts from the FLASH curriculum, but also helped students strengthen their connection to nature and local community resources while having fun in the process,” Bullock said. “Our hope is that the seeds planted during this project will inspire students to better understand and care for their environment, strengthening both their communities now and in the future.”
To learn more about the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Martin-Gatton CAFE, visit https://forestry.mgcafe.uky.edu.
Research reported in this publication was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Award No. 2418793. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.