This year, the Faculty of Environmental Sciences at CZU Prague welcomed students from the University of Salford for the third time. The visit was exceptional not only in terms of its content but also due to the record number of participants – a total of 49 students joined the field trip.
The visit was co-organised by Peter Kumble from the Department of Landscape and Urban Planning, who has been actively involved in developing academic cooperation with international partners. Throughout their stay, the students were also supported by student ambassadors from the Global Sustainability Network (GSN), who played a key role in organising and delivering the programme.
In cooperation with colleagues from the Faculty of Tropical AgriSciences (FTA), the visitors were guided around the CZU campus, including a tour of the tropical and subtropical greenhouse. The programme also included the traditional visit to the university brewery at the Faculty of Engineering, a well-established part of international visits at CZU.
The academic programme was divided into two parallel groups. One group took part in an educational field trip with expert commentary in the Rokytka Watershed, focusing on hydrology and water management in an urban environment. The second group attended a lecture by our colleague Shima Yazdanmehr from the Department of Landscape and Urban Planning, which focused on the visual impact assessment of wind turbines and public preferences towards renewable energy sources. The lecture introduced an open-source method for creating photorealistic simulations and compared the influence of landscape characteristics and turbine configurations on public perception, complemented by findings from social media data analysis.
The programme continued on the following day with activities highlighting the interaction between water, landscape and the city. Students joined a river walk to an urban community farm, crossing a bridge and a weir along the way, and visited the Imperial Island urban community farm. The visit concluded with a tour of the Water Research Institute, where students were introduced to applied water research and explored a physical hydraulic model.
The repeated visits from the University of Salford confirm the strong and long-standing cooperation and the growing interest of international partners in the expertise and academic environment of the Faculty of Environmental Sciences at CZU.
