Wynona School Field Day at The Nature Conservancy's Tall Grass Prairie Preserve Friday, April 30th

This experience will provide our students with an appreciation of grassland and stream ecosystems and the importance of their conservation. Students will gain an appreciation for how grasslands function by studying their unique fauna and flora in the field. Our students along with faculty and parent sponsors 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. Students will compare species diversity among disturbed and relatively pristine sites. We will sample both terrestrial plant and aquatic (stream) invertebrate/fish communities.

The 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.

We will utilize field exercises to improve students’ understanding of scientific method and experimental design while creating a synthesis of Conservation Biology and fundamental statistics.

How will this grant affect student learning? Our participants will experience field studies involving an investigative approach to help students to appreciate the spirit and nature of natural science and develop problem solving, analytical, critical thinking, and synthesis skills. This project will help students become accustomed to playing an active role in science by collecting and working with data rather than simply memorizing facts. Students will study inquiry-based activities in botany and aquatic ecology. Students will conduct field experiments to analyze biodiversity of plants and stream animals (macroinvertebrates, amphibians, and fish).

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.

More information will be forthcoming as we develop the agenda.