The study, led by Roel Dijksma and colleagues at Wageningen’s Hydrology and Environmental Hydraulics group, took advantage of a rare natural experiment. Since 2009, the university’s Master course in Catchment and Climate Hydrology has culminated in an intensive eight-day excursion across Iceland, where students learn to read complex, largely undisturbed landscapes and reconcile what they see with the simplified hydrological models they have built in class. When pandemic restrictions halted all outdoor teaching in 2020 and 2021, a professional video team produced a virtual version of the excursion, filmed on location with the teaching staff. The cohorts of 2020 and 2021, some 105 students in total, completed the course using only this digital material.

Then came the twist. In April 2022, once restrictions lifted, the university offered an additional voluntary excursion to Iceland for those same students. Roughly half, 54 of the 105, were able to join. That created three distinct groups within a single student population: those who had only attended the real excursion, those who had only studied the virtual version, and those who first worked through the virtual materials and later stood on Icelandic soil themselves. The researchers seized the opportunity to send a detailed questionnaire to excursion participants spanning every cohort from 2011 to 2025, asking how the experience had shaped their careers, their scientific thinking, and their views on virtual versus real fieldwork.

The response was striking. Of 134 questionnaires sent to a randomly selected 20 percent of the 676 total participants, 104 were completed, a response rate of 78 percent. Respondents ranged from current Master students to senior scientists with more than fifteen years of professional experience. More than half strongly agreed that planning and fieldwork remain an important part of their current job or study, and the average response across all respondents was moderately agree. Even among the most senior alumni, whose careers have drifted toward modelling and management, the excursion’s contribution to their scientific development was still clearly recognized, though its perceived intensity softened slightly with the passing years.

The starkest contrasts emerged when the virtual-only cohort was compared with everyone who had physically travelled to Iceland. Students who had only studied the video materials were neutral about whether the modelling concepts discussed during the excursion echoed into their later work, while their peers who had made the journey were clearly positive. On the contribution to understanding undisturbed hydrological systems and to overall scientific development, the virtual-only group scored substantially lower, falling to the slightly-to-moderately-agree range, whereas the field participants were strongly to fully in agreement. When asked to distribute ten points between the virtual and the real excursion, the students who had experienced both allocated 8.9 points to the real trip and just 1.1 to its digital counterpart.

Why does the difference run so deep? The students themselves pointed to several factors that a camera, however professional, cannot replicate. They missed the active, location-based learning in a landscape of undisturbed catchments, the direct and inspirational interaction with teaching staff, and the chance to bond with peers into a professional network that lasts well beyond graduation. One participant captured the sentiment in a reflection quoted in the paper: you can learn a lot in a classroom, but an excursion makes you remember. Another described the trip as capturing the very essence of studying, being curious, feeling passionate, and loving the process of learning. The virtual-only group also remained neutral on whether a trip to a more heavily managed area closer to home could substitute for Iceland, while the field participants firmly disagreed, suggesting that the visceral experience of an unmanaged landscape shaped their judgment in ways the video never could.

The choice of Iceland is no accident, and the paper devotes considerable attention to why the island is such a powerful teaching environment. Straddling the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and fed by a mantle plume, Iceland is the only place on Earth where an oceanic ridge rises above sea level thanks to a hotspot, producing young mafic rocks roughly 20 million years old with strikingly different hydraulic properties from older formations. The Gulf Stream warms the southwest while cold Arctic air dominates the north, and the mountains and ice caps boost precipitation by about 40 percent, generating a rainfall gradient from under 400 millimetres per year in the dry northeast to more than 4,000 on some glaciers, and locally even above 7,000. The result is a compact natural laboratory of groundwater-fed rivers, direct runoff rivers and glacier-fed streams, braided and meandering channels, and catchments that remain relatively free of human management.

Climate change is written into that landscape in real time. Glaciers cover about 11 percent of the country, and all of them face strong net ablation, so the share of glacier meltwater in river discharge is rising, with rivers below the large ice caps carrying visibly more meltwater than before, while streams fed by small glaciers are losing their summer melt signal altogether. For students trained to conceptualize precipitation-runoff relationships, flow generation processes, drought propagation and flood forecasting, seeing these processes unfold across such contrasting settings, and then confronting how crudely their computer models represent them, appears to leave a lasting imprint. The survey found that all respondents, regardless of cohort, strongly agreed that the excursion deepened their grasp of undisturbed hydrological systems.

The findings come with honest caveats. The authors, all of whom teach on the excursion, acknowledge their own attachment to the course and took steps to limit bias by keeping the survey anonymous and examining the results from multiple angles. Response rates for the pandemic cohorts were lower than hoped, with only 40 percent of contacted students completing the questionnaire, and some declined because the memory of that stressful period remained too raw. One participant noted that although grateful for the effort behind the virtual excursion, the combination with lockdown was devastating. The authors also note that opinions on flying may have shifted over the years, though the survey showed no trend across cohorts. Still, 74 percent of respondents considered it acceptable to fly to Iceland for the excursion, only 13 percent disagreed, and the researchers argue that careful, selective travel for transformative field learning remains defensible.

The overall conclusion is measured but firm. Virtual excursions, especially as production quality improves and tools like animations and artificial intelligence mature, can be a valuable addition to the teaching toolbox, useful for preparation, revision, or reaching students who cannot travel. But as a replacement for the real thing, they fall short. The students who lived through both versions are unambiguous: the field trip fostered relatedness with peers and teachers, boosted intrinsic motivation across the whole course, and delivered learning that no classroom or screen could match. As the paper’s closing sentiment from a participant suggests, the essence of geoscience education still lies in standing before a river, feeling the wind off an ice cap, and working out for yourself how the water got there.

Subject of Research: Comparing the perceived educational impact of real versus virtual hydrology field excursions among Master students

Article Title: Field or virtual? Perceived impact of academic excursions through the eyes of (future) hydrologists

Article References: Dijksma, R., Teuling, A. J., Melsen, L. A., Bense, V. F., & van der Ploeg, M. J. (2026). Field or virtual? Perceived impact of academic excursions through the eyes of (future) hydrologists. Geoscience Communication, 9(4), 437-450. https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-437-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-437-2026

Keywords: hydrology education, field excursions, virtual field trips, Iceland, Wageningen University, geoscience communication, COVID-19, catchment hydrology, climate change, student survey, fieldwork, scientific development