Salish Sea Heroes: Vashon Nature Center students
Students become independent environmental research scientists amidst a global pandemic.
By: Maria Metler and Bianca Perla, Vashon Nature Center
What do you do when you are preparing to study a disease epidemic and get hit with one yourself? That’s what happened to Vashon High school students in Mr. Browning's biology class who have been conducting community science research projects every year since 2012. In a Hands-on-Science unit delivered by Vashon Nature Center, students tracked the spread of the sea star wasting syndrome epidemic. That’s the disease that has killed a whole lot of sea stars over the last eight years.
The same rock in the San Juan Islands before vs. after sea star wasting disease swept through the entire west coast of North America. This species, sunflower stars, were one of the hardest hit by the disease.
These students have also monitored juvenile salmonid populations, effects of deer grazing, forage fish spawning, shoreline restoration and more. Alongside Vashon Nature Center staff, students get to become citizen scientists, collecting and analyzing data, and reporting discoveries to the community.
The 2020 COVID-19 stay-at-home order put a stop to student groups gathering in the field, endangering both the hands-on outdoor science opportunities for this 9th grade cohort and breaking the multiple years of data collection done by students on these important topics.
Mr. Browning and Vashon Nature Center staff scientists took quick action to transition group field monitoring trips into independent research projects so that students could still get outside to do their hands-on investigations, all the while wondering how it would work. Would the students be able to follow protocols? Access research sites? Stay safe? Understand the big picture of what they were doing and why? The answer was yes! The students did it!
130 freshman students chose one of three areas of focus:
sea star wasting syndrome
amphibians
biodiversity.
From home, students studied background information on their topic. Vashon Nature Center staff provided students with procedures and videos for how to conduct independent field research. This training included a COVID-19 protocol to ensure the safety of students while working outside. Afterwards, students joined one another and experts from around the region in a virtual meeting to discuss their research and what their results mean for the people and wildlife of Vashon Island.
37 students conducted biodiversity surveys outside or near to their homes to understand how having many types of wildlife and plants is important to keep ecosystems stable and resilient to changes. This included how habitats are impacted by human activity and climate change. Together these students made 334 combined observations of 216 plants, 106 animals, and 10 fungi. Of these, 174 unique species were recorded.
The student records will be added to the Salish Sea Biodiversity Project on iNaturalist by Vashon Nature Center staff scientists. iNaturalist is a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society; it is an online crowd-sourced species identification app that helps people connect with nature and scientists around the world gather important critter-locations they wouldn’t be able to track down themselves. All this helps us humans to help wildlife!
42 students monitored their local ponds and wetlands for amphibian presence or absence. They listened for the native frogs in the area as well as the invasive American Bullfrog following protocols adapted from Frog Watch USA, an Association of Zoos and Aquariums community science program. A lot can be understood about watershed health by studying amphibians- they are excellent ecosystem monitors since throughout their life they migrate back and forth from their breeding and rearing freshwater ponds and wetlands to upland forests.
50 students monitored their neighborhood beaches for Sea Star Wasting Syndrome ensuring this long-term effort continued without missing a year of data collection. Vashon High School students have monitored Sea Star Wasting Syndrome alongside Vashon Nature Center scientists trained in the protocols used by the Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Monitoring Network at UC Santa Cruz. Under the context of our current conditions this study of disease transmission seemed more applicable than ever!
While undergoing a time in their life that these students have never witnessed before, they contributed to an ever growing understanding of the biodiversity of the Salish Sea.
These Salish Sea Heroes exemplify how each of us can take part in better understanding how to maintain vibrant, resilient and healthy ecosystems and economic resources for the stability of all life in the Salish Sea-- this incredible international bioregion to which we all belong.