Students Work With VT Department of Environmental Conservation

March 21, 2012

This semester, a hearty band of seventh, ninth, and eleventh – graders are working in our local watershed to better understand some recent changes and how we might be able to address some of those changes.

We started the semester with a workshop led by Jim Pease of the VT Department of Environmental Conservation. Jim has worked with VCS for at least a decade on various projects (you can see him in one of the four posters when you walk into the school). He has tasked us with recording the erosion in the lake-ward streams in our watershed. As you can see in the photo, the lack of snow this winter really helped us effectively document aggradation, degradation, and other stream-wide changes.

On non-field days, our Junior-led groups of three present on endangered or invasive species in our watershed, or lead class discussions on Environmental Management issues. Examples include presentations on Vermont wild cats, polluted rivers catching fire, and the fate of our bat populations. When we are done with our erosion study in a couple of weeks, we will present our work to the town of South Burlington and some concerned neighbors and then move on to the ‘design’ phase of this R&S. We have been asked by the Board of Trustees’ Commons Campus Committee to come up with some designs for a four season experimental greenhouse that would allow us to better understand and/or remediate the ecosystem-wide effects of our changing riparian (stream) systems.

posted by Peter Goff