Florida International University
AC-8: Campus as a Living Laboratory

The FIU Office of Sustainability Nature Preserve Internship Program trains FIU students to be naturalists through hands-on field experience at the FIU Nature Preserve. Student naturalists learn about different habitats, identifying plants, maintaining the walking trails, and removing invasive species of plants. Experienced student naturalists may lead their own volunteer days at the Nature Preserve, engaging with their peers.

Current FIU students volunteer at the annual Wall of Wind (WOW) Mitigation Challenge. The competition has teams of high school students develop innovative wind mitigation concepts and solutions within guidelines set by Wall of Wind engineers. It educates high school students about the importance of mitigation and community resilience. 

Engineering students use the Wall of Wind lab at FIU's Engineering Center to conduct tests on large-scale building models to test performance of building envelopes and roofing systems under various wind loads and the response of envelope components under realistic wind conditions. Conclusions derived from these experiments can help civil engineers design more resilient buildings. 

The FIU-Florida Power & Light (FPL) microgrid, powered by the solar array at the Engineering Center, gives students and researchers the ability to gain hands-on experience with cutting-edge technology. The research will help advance renewable energy by expanding information about resiliency during extreme weather and power grid events. 

Several student groups were a major part of the implementation of the Plastics if You Ask campaign, where campus food vendors removed all plastic straws, cup lids, and bags from the dining counters and made them available only upon request. 

A team of FIU engineering students won first place in the Demonstration category of the Environmental Protection Agency's Campus RainWorks Challenge with their project "Resilient Mast @FIU:Adapting the FIU MAST for Living with Coastal Waters Under Extreme Events." It focused on mitigating the risk of coastal flooding, incorporating more green infrastructure and reducing urban heat island effects at the MAST building on FIU's Biscayne Bay Campus. 

Food scraps are collected from the 8th Street Campus Kitchen Dining Hall at FIU Modesto A. Maidique Campus (MMC) and from FIU Chaplin School of Hospitality & Tourism Management at FIU Biscayne Bay Campus (BBC). The food scraps are then taken to the compost stalls at the FIU Nature Preserve. The finished compost is used as a soil amendment by the FIU Agroecology program of the Department of Earth and Environment in a garden that supplies FIU’s Wine Spectator Restaurant Management Lab with fresh produce for the Advanced Food Production classes.

Henington Lake on FIU's main campus functions as a freshwater wetlands research area. The Department of Earth and the Environment's Field Ecology course identifies wetland species around the lake, tests water quality, and conducts ecological land topography measurements.

FIU's Academy for International Disaster Preparedness hosts an annual Disaster Field Course Simulation training in which FIU students get first-hand experience responding to a large-scale simulated international disaster. The course brings together professionals from local agencies and nongovernmental organizations with elected officials to help run high-level exercises. The three-day field operation exercise held at FIU is the culmination of an 11-month intensive course that trains students on how to respond to extreme disasters across the globe. 

SHAPE is a group of students, known as Peer Educators, who are trained in a variety of health-related topics to inform and educate their peers through university-wide presentations and programs. These program topics may include, but are not limited to, Nutrition and Fitness, Substance Use and Abuse, Stress Management, Sexual Education, and Preventative Health.