26 Current Advances in Geoscience Education Research (Posters)

This session will highlight empirical research being done in the field of geoscience education. We welcome submissions from geoscience education researchers at all career stages to showcase projects that highlight current areas of interest in the discipline.

Sunday, 19 October 2025
8:00 AM - 5:30 PM
HBGCC, Hall 1

Towards SAFER fieldwork: building an incident database for accident and near-miss analysis

Paper number: 26-2
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 8:00 AM – 8:00 AM

Authors

Abstract

Are you a field scientist or field educator? We invite you to shape how the community thinks about practicing safe fieldwork by sharing your experience of an adverse field experience anonymously at  https://tinyurl.com/SAFERsciencesurvey.

Fieldwork is foundational to geoscience education and research, with most geosciences programs in the U.S. requiring field-based learning experiences. As geoscientists and geoscience educators, we may interact with fieldwork as both a research and teaching tool.  Fieldwork carries inherent risks to both physical and mental health of researchers, yet the frequency, number, severity, type, and contributing factors of adverse incidents are not well-documented. Efforts to quantify negative fieldwork outcomes have focused on fatalities or harassment, leaving a critical gap in data on other types of incidents and near-misses (events that could have resulted in an incident but ultimately did not).

Scientist Adverse Field Experiences Research (SAFER), an NSF-funded project (Award SBA/SMA-2314594) that seeks to understand systemic patterns leading to accidents and near misses during field research across disciplines. Using a community-based survey, we are building a database of incidents to understand the who, what, where, why, and how of adverse field experiences and to explore the lasting impacts on scientists’ well-being and career trajectories.  We hypothesize that incidents occur in complex sociotechnical systems with multiple contributing factors, not as the result of a single root cause.  We employ a systems-based technique for accident analysis to understand the causes of these incidents. These data will form the foundation for future risk identification and mitigation strategies in field practice and education.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs. Vol. 57, No. 6

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-413182

© Copyright 2025 The Geological Society of America (GSA), all rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to the author(s) of this abstract to reproduce and distribute it freely, for noncommercial purposes. Permission is hereby granted to any individual scientist to download a single copy of this electronic file and reproduce up to 20 paper copies for noncommercial purposes advancing science and education, including classroom use, providing all reproductions include the complete content shown here, including the author information. All other forms of reproduction and/or transmittal are prohibited without written permission from GSA Copyright Permissions.