July 2019
Science in the City
Project objectives:
EcoSpark trains teachers, students, and community members to use citizen science to monitor and assess the health of the natural world around them. By teaching people when, where and how to identify native and invasive species, to find bees and butterflies, birds and frogs, and even the benthic invertebrates in the bottom of their local streams, EcoSpark connects people to the natural world around them. Discovering how to assess the health of their local ecosystem is the first of many steps to making informed conservation decisions that contribute to the enhancement of our natural world.
Science in the City combines EcoSpark’s core programs in a multi-year, community-level engagement project designed to assess ecosystem health from a variety of perspectives. In keeping with our motto: “Discover – Act – Change”, this project begins with a year of habitat mapping and monitoring followed by several years of stewardship activities, follow-up monitoring and community reporting. The activities are designed to create a sense of community ownership, to identifying areas in need of remediation and to build partnerships and local teams to address them.
