Wynona High School Science Dept. Wins 2nd Year's Funding From Oklahoma Dept. of Environmental Quality

This project will provide our students with an appreciation of grassland ecosystems and the importance of their conservation. Students will visit The Nature Conservancy’s Tall Grass Prairie Preserve in Osage County, Oklahoma. Students will learn how to collect data using the scientific method and establishing sample plots and will compare species diversity among disturbed and relatively pristine sites.

This project is designed to educate and motivate students and to instill in them an intrinsic appreciation for grassland ecosystems. We hope this field experience will help shape our future leaders to be citizens of the global environment.

We will apply conservation issues to personal experiences in order to build positive student attitudes toward the natural environment. We aim to guide the development of student’s problem solving and critical thinking skills while exploring relationships among: biodiversity, ecosystem processes, and societal issues.

In 2009 we received this grant that allowed our school to the same field experience to forty five 6-12th grade students. This year we will collect data for comparison to our 1st sampling at our established sites. Last season this field trip was the highlight of our science lessons allowing students to apply what they had learned in classroom exercises. Our field trip also facilitated parents and community leaders to get involved. As a direct result of last year’s funding we now offer Zoology as a junior/senior level class at our school. The organisms we collected in the field were preserved for long-term use in our teaching collection. We intend to further expand the collection this year in addition to data that will compare to last season. This year we want to expand the field curriculum to include 4th and 5th grade students as well.

Students will be directed in the use of standardized methods for sampling plants and aquatic animals and basic experimental design. The number of species and their relative abundance will be compared among sites using elementary statistics and basic graphing techniques. We will apply appropriate experimental design and statistical analyses to data collected in the field. Basic statistical procedures will include measures of central tendency, dispersion, and variability. Additionally, tables and graphs will be used to analyze trends in the data we collect.


Several studies over the past two decades have shown that aquatic animals, especially invertebrates, are excellent indicators of water quality. These procedures are commonly used by municipalities and state and federal agencies to assess the biological integrity of streams. The basic underlying assumption is that aquatic organisms and their presence/absence are useful indicators of environmental health. For this reason, students can easily relate these field and laboratory activities to real-world applications such as water quality assessment, drinking water standards, and environmental protection policies.  To learn more abouty the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality and it's education programs visit their web site at: http://www.deq.state.ok.us/mainlinks/eepage.htm