Swan's Island and Frenchboro join Red Tide Monitoring Project

The fifth grade class at Tremont Consolidated School recognized on their own that if they were the first alert system for MDI (being that red tide hits the outer part of MDI first) that students on the outer islands could get involved and give a heads-up to MDI students when Alexandrium cells (the type of red tide phytoplankton that cause shellfish poisoning) emerge from the bottom of the ocean to affect clams and mussels on the outer island shores. We have been inspired to offer resources and support to teachers in the outer island schools.

Objective:

            As a result of this project, teachers and students on Swans Island and Frenchboro will have opportunities to implement a project that will have a positive impact on their community and will help to inform environmental research on Mount Desert Island.  Students on MDI will learn from their peers about the state of water quality around an offshore island, while students on Swans Island and Frenchboro will have access to data from MDI.  In the exchange, all students may come to better understand emerging trends, and, in fact, may make significant contributions to the current understanding of water quality and habitat changes in the Gulf of Maine. 

This project will benefit students and teachers on the outer islands as well as students and teachers on MDI.  We are particularly excited to include the incredible 5th graders from Tremont Consolidated School in planning the outreach project to Swans Island.  They know what their challenges were when they got started.  They have learned a lot about quality control, caring for equipment, being safe in the field, as well as running water quality tests, identifying phytoplankton, entering data, and most recently, reviewing data and catching their mistakes (like not averaging their dissolved oxygen readings).  They will be able to view data entries by outer island students and provide feedback via the on-line forum or through e-mail.  Eventually, the Swans island students will be able to provide this service for students on other islands as well as for students on MDI.  All students from all schools will soon be able to upload digital images of phytoplankton into our database and quiz each other or ask each other for help with identification.  Amazingly, students are able to use conventional digital cameras to take pictures of phytoplankton at 100-400x by turning off the flash option and using the digital zoom feature.  Students are amassing digital libraries of images that are proving useful in training, corroboration, and assessment of projects.  Our on-line tools are empowering teachers and students to implement and evaluate projects with a little guidance from MDIWQC staff and providing opportunity for feedback through our on-line forum.  These tools will be particularly useful for teachers on Swans Island and Frenchboro, who may need to develop skills and get feedback from a distance.  These teachers will be particularly helpful in evaluating the website since they may be relying more heavily on the phytoplankton project tools.

Goals:

• Honor the ideas and initiative of the Tremont 5th graders to include their outer island peers in an important environmental monitoring program that helps to ensure public health in local communities.
• Give our outer island teachers the same resources to participate in authentic environmental stewardship projects with their students as we have been able to provide to teachers on MDI.
• Create a strong community among teachers on MDI and the outer islands as they engage in environmental stewardship service learning projects, so that they can support each other in these endeavors, and
• Add to growing datasets of baseline water quality data around MDI and the surrounding islands that will help us understand emerging trends in water quality and ecosystem health.

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