Year 2
AP Environmental Science students design protocols for monitoring the health of our ecosystem over time and collect and record baseline data. They also work to increase community environmental awareness through video announcements
2018-2019 AP Environmental Science Class (left to right) Jordan Turner, Christopher Rorie, Eduardo Ochoa, David Rozmys, Darnyel Hogan, Alyssa Dickerson, Franklin Lassen, Mia Black, Alaysha Brown, Sara Borsodi, Trinity Prior not pictured Kailey Beal, Teionjanae Delaney, Trinity Gaynor, Makayla Hinz, Destiny Kelly, LaNeise Larkin, Skyy Riley, Devan Robinson, Todja Saunders, Kayla Smith, Caleb Sykes, Jade White
We started the year similarly to last year. Students took several inventories of our immediate area on our schools campus. They already knew about the project that the AP Environmental Science class started last year so they were naturally drawn to that area above other issues in our school. After some initial walkabouts outside, on our roof, and through the school hallways and cafeteria we came together as a class to create a list of strengths and weaknesses, which eventually led to a proposal for a project to "fix" the retention pond area. We created a driving questions board that served as a place to record the questions students thought they would need to answer to address the issues we saw (and some of the questions had to do with finding out what the issues actually were). While organizing these questions the students realized they fell into groups - and that it might be a good idea to split the class into groups to attack each category of questions. The following video gives a glimpse of what students were thinking in the early stages of working with their groups:
The class realized the job we were undertaking was pretty big and we would need to convince people to help us pay for it. They decided it was important to learn why there is a pond there at all (before the addition to our school, this was not a pond). They found out all the extra roof water needed to go somewhere... why not just into the drains? Where does that water go? This led to them wanting to learn more about our watershed - so we decided to do fall monitoring with the Rouge Education project. They learned a lot about what things can be monitored to determine the health of a river, and wondered if they could use some of the same tests for our body of water. As were began to create protocols and collect baseline data, they realized there were a lot of plants and animals that they couldn't identify so we used iNaturalist in conjunction with some other identification resources to determine the number of different species in our area as well as the number of individuals of each species.
Learning about the importance of wetlands to mitigate harmful effects on our watershed led students to be interested in looking at other types of wetlands as well as other bodies of water. We have plants to work with the Vernal Pool Patrol again as well as a field trip to Inland Seas to investigate Lake Michigan. We are also planning a field trip to the Combined Sewer Overflow basin in Redford and potentially the Wastewater Treatment plant in Detroit to gather more information about water quality in our area.
Learning about the importance of wetlands to mitigate harmful effects on our watershed led students to be interested in looking at other types of wetlands as well as other bodies of water. We have plants to work with the Vernal Pool Patrol again as well as a field trip to Inland Seas to investigate Lake Michigan. We are also planning a field trip to the Combined Sewer Overflow basin in Redford and potentially the Wastewater Treatment plant in Detroit to gather more information about water quality in our area.