For study requirement and study bonus, do you need to spend the entire season in the presence of your art?
I'm thinking especially of things like Perdo 0's dying insect, Corpus 15's human body to dissect and Animal 35's dissecting several magical animals. Are you going to be spending a large amount of the season going out to collect new samples? I feel like you can't expect a corpse to last a whole season.
Or for things like Rego 20's at a law court, do you need to spend the entire season studying within that court?
Alternatively, I think it would be reasonable to say that you only need it for a fraction of the season, and similar to adventuring, you spend the rest of the season consolidating what you learned from your studies.
Wanted to see which of the two other people were using, or if they had another approach.
Yes and no. I would say you do need to be in contact with the study source but don't go overboard with it either. There are some extreme phenomenon in there, so it will require a judgment call. I would require a season in a law court if someone wanted to benefit from that but I would obviously not require a season flying in a hurricane for Auram 35. My advice, if one of your player wants it is to expand the table rapidly to provide clearer guidance. It should be achievable, bearing in mind that study bonus is in competition with other learning virtues. Go case by case.
The rules are slightly muddy, but I don't think one has to be too hard and adapt it to the table. For example, in my own campaign I'm quite lenient on the adventuring - especially if their lab totals are much higher than minimum. For critical things, I do limit or stop adventuring (and longer adventures will have impact). They get their study bonuses etc the same way really, and that works well for our saga (which is dense with crazy happenings so they need it).
As for corpse access - the magus can easily conserve it with magic (or if mundane with ice, or just storing it in the root cellar) to have it last significantly longer. Once studied for part of the time, a lot of the work will also be in library, using drawings, or with the humors or fluids in various experiments one can imagine.
However, you can make it a storyline to secure access to more than one body as they need it for study - which will have adventure and story implications. (I'm doing this in my own campaign, as the magi must secure bodies repeatedly to their very scary resident necromancer they're afraid to do something about)
my interpretation is that the Study Bonus does have to be present most of the season (as per normal partial season rules). Though it is unreasonable to have a mage flying around in a hurricane while reading a book, we did have a magus build a lab in a regio with a permanent storm, letting him go in and out and keep the bonus-source present. For dissecting corpses... I just assume that the magus will need a new corpse every couple of weeks.
Even if the magus doesn't have a book or lab inside the potentially troublesome source, they should have access to that source all season.
I'd say they would need to have access to the feature all the season (or at least all the parts of the season allocated for study), even if they don't actually make use of it all the time.
While they don't have to fly around in a hurricane all the time, they will have to go back to the hurricane now and then to observe something or make some measurement.
Worth noting that the more bothersome requirements for Study Bonus/Study Requirement don't appear until you reach Art scores of 20+, and the really problematic ones only for scores of 30+. By then you should have plenty of ways to manage meeting the requirements anyway.
More or less. I mean you might find yourself conducting study at odd times of day when storms are available for studying Aurem, it's not like you have to have it nearby when you are sleeping because you are studying the art. I would also count the wind up and wind down to a major storm as counting- to me the benefit of watching the entire "life cycle" would outweigh the downside of it not being at full strength the entire time.
It is always useful to consider the intent and to be pragmatic.
At level 5, the requirement is supposed to be trivial, so if requiring a full season makes it non-trivial, a part-season ought to do.
At level 15, the requirement is supposed to pose a manageable challenge; if part-season is trivial, it is not good enough.
At level 30, the requirement is supposed to generate stories in search for ways to meet the requirement, and better stories are required at level 35 than at level 25.
IMHO that's all you need to know. Everything else can be improvised.