First Maryland Leaf Packers Community Collaborative Comparing Urban and Rural Streams

Contributed by Marianne Butler, Environmental Education Intern, Baltimore Ecosystem Study, http://www.beslter.org/

Last spring, elementary and middle school students from West Baltimore added some new words to their vocabulary: decomposition, macroinvertebrates and urban-rural gradient. Where in the world did they learn this language? Through their participation in SuperKidsGrow, an after school program run by the Parks and People Foundation (http://www.parksandpeople.org/), a non-profit organization committed to providing educational and recreational opportunities to urban youth and enhancing their communities through greening initiatives.

The students were excited about doing the same Stroud Center Leaf Pack investigation that Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai’s Green Belt Movement had done with students in Kenya. Scientists from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), a long-term ecological research study of Baltimore, helped the kids select three streams along an urban- rural gradient where they gathered and placed leaf packs.

Back in the classroom the students discussed their observations and reviewed aerial photographs of the sites. Based on their observations and their studies of pervious and impervious surfaces, they hypothesized that the rural stream would yield the most macro-invertebrates (This hypothesis was later validated by their study results).

After a month the leaf packs were retrieved and processed with the help of Dr. Chris Swan and his research assistants at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), where the students got to use UMBC’s high-powered microscopes. The students then prepared a report of the investigation.

The Leaf Pack Investigation is a perfect fit for the SuperKidsGrow ecology curriculum that BES is developing. This initiative, which brought hands-on inquiry-based science to urban students and enabled them to visit with ecologists at a top-notch university, is part of a larger effort to increase minority representation in the field of ecology.