Five Paul Kane students took home a big chunk of wood for their school this week after winning big at the Alberta Envirothon.
Five Paul Kane students took home a big chunk of wood for their school this week after winning big at the Alberta Envirothon.
Shayna Harris, Nathan Hambleton, Caitlin Kamminga, Ian Ferrier and Laura Duguay captured the bronze medal last weekend at the Long Lake Centre deep in the woods southwest of Athabasca during the 2012 Alberta Envirothon. The students were one of two teams from the school at the event.
This annual event challenges high-school students across the province to test their skills in the areas of forestry, soils, land use, aquatic ecology and wildlife.
This year's special topic was non-point source pollution, which refers to pollution that comes from many dispersed sources, cars, for example. In addition to tests such as identifying water bugs, the team also had to design an eco-friendly community that was under threat from a sawmill, flooding and a mountain pine beetle infestation.
The teams slept in cabins with wood fires and outhouses, Kamminga says, which made for a great bonding experience.
For taking third, the team got a big chunk of polished wood taken from a tree that had been killed by mountain pine beetle, says Candice Jwaszko, the team's teacher advisor.
"The top three teams were all within two points of each other," she adds, so it was a tight contest.
Contests like the Envirothon help foster environmental values in young people, Jwaszko says. People think you're crazy nowadays if you don't have a TV or cellphone, she says, yet no one bats an eye if you don't know where your water comes from.
"We need to go back to basics and encourage [students to learn] how the planet works and how to care for the planet."
Harris says she plans to go into environmental studies next year at the University of Guelph.
"I'm really interested in all the big systems on the planet and how they interact," she says, such as the biosphere and hydrosphere. "It's ridiculously cool that we're the only planet we know of that works like this."
A local science team wants you to tell them about the state of the Sturgeon River through an online survey.
The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology's (NAIT) Sturgeon River research group launched an online survey earlier this week. The survey, which is open to anyone over 18 who lives in the Sturgeon watershed, aims to get information on how the watershed has changed over the last 50 years.
The Sturgeon watershed stretches from Hoople Lake (near Entwistle) to the North Saskatchewan River, and includes parts of St. Albert, Edmonton, Parkland, Barrhead, Westlock and Sturgeon County.
The NAIT team plans to use the survey to guide its future research and to fill in data gaps on subjects like fish, says Laurie Hunt, the NAIT biologist who co-founded the team.
"Lots of people have the impression that the Sturgeon River has always been a dirty little river that's not very productive in terms of fish, and that's not the case."
Fish are good indicators of habitat health, Hunt says, but there's little historical detail on their numbers outside of lakes in the Sturgeon watershed.
"We certainly know that [lake] sturgeon used to reside in the river," she says as an example, but they don't anymore.
Pike and suckers also seem to have replaced walleye, perch and sturgeon, which could suggest a drop in water quality.
The survey asks residents to rank what they feel are the most important uses of the river (such as recreation and industry) and how often they use it in various ways (such as ice fishing or gravel mining). It also asks how, if at all, the region's fish, mammal and bird populations have changed over time.
Watershed planning comes from the community, Hunt says, so it's important to know how people want the Sturgeon to be used. The team has sent the survey to many industry, government and volunteer groups to get a variety of responses.
It also asks residents to rank steps they think should be taken to improve the Sturgeon, such as the frequent suggestion to dam or dredge the river.
Many of the steps on that list aren't that sound from a biological standpoint, Hunt notes, but they might be ones people would consider. The team hopes to gauge how knowledgeable residents are about watershed issues using this and other questions to better target their education efforts.
The team hopes to attract at least 400 respondents by the middle of summer, Hunt says, and aims to have the results compiled by the fall.
The 15-minute survey is available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/sturgeonriverwatershed.
