Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Schools Tracking the Woolly Bully-2015

Schools Tracking  the Woolly Bully at field site and field trip

Students from Amherst Regional High School and the MacDuffie School look near and far to find traces of the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid and its impact on our forests.







Amherst Regional High School South Campus students took an up-close look at some mysterious tiny creatures they discovered while searching for the Woolly Adelgid at their schoolyard field site. 


Photos by Alex Walsh
Here are some pictures a student took when we were looking at a woolly hemlock branch under the microscope.  These look like spiders.  We noticed a lot of web-like material in addition to the egg sacs.

Karen MurphyAmherst H.S. South Campus Teacher

Response from Project Ecologist, Dr. David Orwig:

Great pictures of spider mites, which are very common on hemlock branches, and why you observed web-like material.
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To learn More about the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid and its Impact on our Hemlock forests:  


See location and data for these schools and others who are tracking the presence of the invasive insect, The Hemlock Woolly Adelgid on our interactive field site map at: 
Woolly Bully sitemap-datalink

View a short video clip about hemlock trees today at:  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGk-VBRDwwo#t=96

See more about the Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology Woolly Bully Project open to any school at: http://harvardforest.fas.harvard.edu/woolly-bully-invasive-pest-hemlock-woolly-adelgid

See the recent book about Hemlock written by Harvard Forest ecologists, at:  Hemlock; A Forest Giant On the Edge




Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Overlook Middle School Teacher Awarded for Excellence




Teacher, JoAnn Mossman, Awarded for Excellence in Environmental Education

Joann Mossman receiving award from Matthew A. Beaton, Secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Awards at the Massachusetts State House on May 11, 2015

JoAnn was one of 6 teachers in the state to win "First Honors". Read about her impressive work below:


JoAnn does not only tackle environmental education via one or two events or class sessions or by engaging in only one aspect of natural science.  Instead, she partners with local nonprofit organizations and brings her own personal passions to bear in order to engage students in ongoing, long term projects that allow them to go deeper and deeper in their learning process over time. She not only engages students who are academically advanced, but she provides detailed scaffolding to support all levels of learners.  Her lesson plans and activities are well thought out and detailed, addressing all kinds of learning styles as well as National and State Science frameworks. 

JoAnn involves her students in hands-on ecological and agricultural studies all in walking distance to their school.  She and her students participate in a field study called “Buds, Leaves, and Global Warming” looking at how the local growing season of native trees changes over time.  With her leadership, the Overlook School has contributed five years of fall and spring leaf fall and budburst data to the online database that serves an entire network of schools in Massachusetts.   From there, students have been able to download and graph their data, looking for patterns or trends in the length of the growing season.  Along the way, they have learned about identification characteristics and seasonal changes in their own adopted trees. 

JoAnn’s students also get down and dirty as participants in a school garden program.  JoAnn led a group of teachers in writing a grant to their local educational foundation (The Ashburnham-Westminster Foundation for Academic Excellence) to get the funds to build a school garden. Work on developing the garden included involving students in engineering design activities to clear the area and build and install 4 cedar raised bed gardens. The first year JoAnn had the students research native pollinators (bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds), their decreasing population #s and the foods they need at the different phases in their lives. They then researched the plants these pollinators require and came up with a list of the ones that will thrive in their zone in Ashburnham. They then went to the staff for donations, received a bunch, planted and now care for the two beds for the pollinators. Later classes have done population counts and replaced plants that didn't make it.

JoAnn also sets up a worm composting bin in the classroom that her class uses for open inquiry lessons. It ties in with articles from Mother Earth News and Organic Gardening, regarding the severe lack of viable topsoil the world has to grow all the food it needs to sustain all of the living organisms on it. By using the classroom composter they see how easy it is to "make" compost and think about what if every one of the 7 billion humans put just one handful of new topsoil (compost) into the environment? She is trying to get the students NOT to be overwhelmed by the huge problems of the world's environment but to see if everyone did one small action to help.

As if studying the ecology of trees, complete with data management;  writing a grant; building a school garden with worm composting were not enough, JoAnn and her teammate created a computer course called "Researching Your Environment" in which students choose their research topic from a number of native plant and animal species who are listed as endangered or threatened. They research the organism, the reasons why they are endangered or threatened (mostly human impact: habitat loss, pollution, etc.), and come up with some solutions to help the organism better survive. Along with their solutions, students have to come up with both positive and negative implications for their ideas. The students really get into it; they create Microsoft brochures and PowerPoint projects to see how different information can be conveyed in different ways.
     
JoAnn takes a leadership role in all of these ongoing projects.  She is called on by both Harvard Forest and MAC to mentor other teachers as a presenter at workshops, as well as a contributor of lesson plans and learning resources that all teachers can access.  JoAnn has taken the Mass Agriculture in the Classroom (MAC) graduate course for the past 3 summers visiting a number of different farms all over Massachusetts She hosted one of the MAC workshop days at her family’s 96 acre tree farm/ 4 acre- vegetable, fruit and perennial garden. She has been invited to present her worm composting lesson at additional MAC workshops. She has presented at several spring workshops for teachers at Harvard Forest as well as mentored new teachers at the Schoolyard Ecology Summer Institute. The quality of her presentations and the resources she generously shares is really makes JoAnn stand out.   

According to JoAnn, her primary motive driving all of this work is “getting kids to see what is right in front of them and right around them here in New England, and how their actions, both positive and negative, can make such an impact...it is so important to me.”   In other words she would like them to learn to take civic responsibility through individual choices and actions drawn from knowledge gained through their multifaceted education at Overlook Middle School. 

Overlook Middle School science teacher Joann Mossman, left, is honored at the Statehouse on Monday by state Sen. Anne Gobi. Mossman received the
Senator Anne Gobi personally commended JoAnn for her achievement.  The senator provided a guided tour of the State House after JoAnn received her award in the Great Hall. 

Friday, May 8, 2015

Student Samples- Growing Season Graphs and Conclusions

Holyoke Catholic Ninth Grade Student Graphs and Data Analysis from the Buds, Leaves and Global Warming study from 2012-2014

This series of graphs, result statements, and conclusions were created by HCHS H.S. freshman led by Schoolyard Teacher, Lise Letellier.   


I am posting these samples with comments from Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology project ecologist, Dr. John O'Keefe to serve as models for other schools implementing schoolyard projects. These students worked hard practicing graphing real data collected at their field sites, and trying to analyze the data and form conclusions about it. 


Note From Harvard Forest Project Ecologist, Dr. John O'Keefe:

Hannah, check data for tree HO-7 in 2012-It looks very late.






Notes for Hannah from project ecologist, Dr. John O'Keefe:  

  • Title of the graph should be Growing Season by "Species"-same word for singular and plural. 
  •  Growing season by tree generally is quite variable with little consistent pattern
  • Most species had a long growing season in 2013 esp. Exotic Cherries (EC) and red maples (RM).  
  • 2012 and 2014 were generally shorter with 2012 shortest in hornbeam (HO) and red maple (RM).
  • Hard to say much with only 3 years ( and only 2 for some species and individuals) of data.
  • Differences might be obvious if the scale ranges were reduced , i.e. Julian Date budburst 80-160 rather than 0-160. Even more relevant for leaf fall, i.e. 250-350 rather than 0-400.  



 Note to Claire From Project Ecologist, Dr. John O'Keefe:

Budbreak 2012 was the earliest year.  Check data for tree HO-7.  
2013 was intermediate and 2014 was the latest. 





Notes to Claire from Project Ecologist, Dr. John O'Keefe:


  • Leaf Fall : Tree EC-10 has the earliest leaf fall, but there was little pattern across years. Generally exotic cherries (EC) had early leaf fall and hornbeams (HO) had late leaf fall. 
  • Growing Season: Generally 2012 was longest and 2014 shortest but not for all individuals.
  • Analysis by Species:  Hard to say much here with only 3 of the study's species having all years worth of data.  

Thanks so much to Claire, Hannah, and Lise for sharing this important work!!!

We so much appreciate the depth of the work you are doing in Holyoke, and very much hope that it serves as a model for other schools.  

We invite other schools to send us comments about these models or samples of student work, lesson plans, resources or photos from their schools by emailing to psnow@fas.harvard.edu