Onion bags filled with soggy leaves are bringing new life to the classroom—and new understanding of forest ecosystems.
Bob Connick regularly sends students from his chemistry class into the small stream that runs alongside Mahopac High School, in Mahopac, NY, to collect scientific data.
And Connick says they’re thrilled about it. “Especially the big guys. I had them out there after it snowed—they’re in their waders, cracking through the ice—and they come back, and it’s all laughing and talking: ‘This guy fell in, this one did that.’ After they get through all of that, I say, ‘But did you get the data I asked you to get?’ And they say, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, we got it all—look!’”
For 20 years, Connick says, his pupils have been collecting all kinds of data on chemistry, temperature, and stream flow from this tiny creek in the woods of Putnam County, NY, 40 miles north of New York City. Over time, Connick says, he began to see changes in the creek, and not for the better.
A few years ago, he introduced to his classes a new way to evaluate the quality of the stream that he felt might shed more light on what was happening.
The program, called the Leaf Pack Network, focuses on the macroinvertebrates that colonize the leaf litter on the streambed. It was developed by educators at the Stroud Water Research Center in Pennsylvania and modeled after techniques used by professionals worldwide to evaluate the ecological condition of natural streambeds and their adjacent forests.
Liz Brooking, communications director for the Stroud Water Research Center, says the Leaf Pack kit is a simple tool, comprising mainly “inexpensive, readily accessible products.”
According to Brooking, educators at Stroud, in partnership with the LaMotte Company, which specializes in water quality testing equipment, conceived it as a simplified and inexpensive macroinvertebrate sampling kit that can be used by volunteers of all ages and all levels of scientific skill.
“The primary tool is an onion bag,” she says. Volunteers fill the onion bags with leaves gathered from the wooded areas near a stream. They then anchor the leaf packs to the streambed for several weeks to provide habitat for the tiny creatures that live in the waters.
Connick says it’s pretty simple to use. “We collect the leaves sometime in October and put them in. Then we take them out in December or January.”
Along with the onion bag, the kit provides aids to help identify the “bugs” that crawl into the leaf clumps. Brooking says the kit includes “little Petri dishes, and flash cards with photographs that illustrate the bugs that you’re supposed to be looking for—what are their shapes, what are they called, and whether they are pollution-sensitive or less so.”
“The only thing the volunteers have to supply are the leaves,” says Brooking.
When volunteers return to the stream to collect the bundles, they evaluate the mix of organisms they find in the soggy leaves as indicators of the stream’s health.
Connick encourages his students to devise their own unique experiments using the Leaf Pack kits. “I tell them how it works and let them decide what to do,” he says. “You could mix all different kinds of leaves; you could have a control pack; you could put all maple leaves in another pack; or you could do forested versus non-forested areas.”
A Bug’s-Eye View
Connick contrasts the Leaf Pack program with chemical testing, which he says “only gives you a snapshot of water quality for a day. There could be pollutants running through there at night, and the next morning we could go out with chemical tests and everything would look nice.
“But with Leaf Pack, these guys live there,” he continues, and studying them, he says, will provide clues to things that might “happen that we don’t know about.”
Connick says the packs his students collected from the creek were beginning to paint a picture of a stream in decline. “There were a lot of things like sow bugs, aquatic worms, and leeches, and that showed that there were a lot of organics involved,” he explains. Some of the effects, he thought, could be traced to grass clippings from the school’s lawn that sometimes ended up in the creek.
But he says there were other problems, too, which he confided to Putnam County’s Soil and Water Conservation manager, Laurie Taylor. According to Connick, a section of the creek where water once flowed freely had become clogged, and the bank had begun to spread out like a miniature “beach”—not an ideal environment for aquatic life.
Taylor agrees with Connick’s assessment. “Our big problem was the sand and the silt that was coming off the roads,” she says.
She explains, “With all of the old-fashioned catch basin drainage systems leading to this ponded area—basically a sediment basin—it was filling up. The ecosystem was changing, and he was actually starting to lose the area as a classroom.”
The impact of these changes was not just academic. Mahopac High School had been designated as a municipal separate storm sewer system and charged with managing the quality of stormwater runoff entering the Lower Hudson River Drainage Basin from its grounds. And the creek, though small, flows into a prized trout stream. In addition, the watershed eventually feeds the Hudson River, which, Taylor notes, is where New York City gets its drinking water.
Connick and Taylor brainstormed over how to preserve the creek to reach both teaching and stormwater-quality goals. They decided to pursue a grant funded by the United States Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
Connick dubbed their plan “The Genesis Project,” and he got to work writing proposals.
“It started out as a simple idea to restore the wetland in front of the school,” says Connick. However, “by nothing short of divine intervention, we wound up with about $150,000 worth of grant money and in-kind services.”
He notes that a lot of the data to support the project came from work done by his science students. He credits Leaf Pack experiments, in particular, for adding credibility to his funding requests, because they were “telling us three or four years in a row that the stream was ecologically compromised,” he says.
According to Connick, the ability to electronically archive and retrieve the information also made a big difference. “With our chemical program, I have been collecting data for 20 years and haven’t been able to put it on any site. Some of it has been lost or misplaced,” he says. In contrast, Leaf Pack Network “is one of the few programs that actually provides a place to store the information.” It’s exciting for the students, says Connick, especially when they compare their information using the charts and graphs the Web site allows them to build.
Group Projects Big and Small
Connick says the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation was so thrilled about The Genesis Project that “we were the top recipient for a grant application. We got $15,000 from them.”
The project also generated a network of partners. Taylor says the New York City Department of Environmental Protection became a partner because of the connection to that city’s drinking water system. Other partners in the project included Mahopac High School, Putnam County Soil and Water Conservation District, and Leaf Pack Network itself. And Taylor says the project also managed to get some assistance from the US Department of Agriculture through its Wetlands Reserve Program.
With all of these heavy hitters involved, Connick wanted to make sure the kids also had their say. He and fellow teachers came up with an exercise for science class called “Pave It—Or Save It,” to see what the kids felt about how the grant funding would be spent.
He told the students, “We can either pave the front over and cover the stream, or we can save the stream, fix it up a little bit, and use it as an outside classroom.”
“Pave it or save it?” became the question of the day. To answer the question, he instructed the students to refer to the data from their “macro” studies and the chemical tests. At the end of the exercise, Connick says, “Most of the groups decided that they wanted to save the stream and not pave it over.”
“It’s been a great activity,” says Taylor, commenting on the entire project. “The students have been involved all along. They had to actually present the project to the school board. It was great to have them do that; it was a great experience for them.”
When the restoration work began, the students and their families contributed on weekends by helping to plant bushes and trees to create a buffer around the stream.
Taylor says grant funding and in-kind services enabled the county to “replace all of the old traditional catch basins with the water-quality inlets,” equipped with sumps, to keep the sediments out of the stream. She says workers restored a pond-like character to a wetland area of the stream, and additional modifications were made “to bring back the riffle and pool situation that you want in the stream for your macroinvertebrates.”
On a particularly steep roadway adjacent to the project, Taylor says, a newly installed Continuous Deflective Separation device now “collects all the sand coming down that road and doesn’t allow it to get deposited into the stream,” eliminating a major source of impairment.
To accommodate Connick’s science classes, Taylor says, “We built little plateaus at certain areas along the stream, to allow them to sample a lot easier than they had been doing.” Now, she says, “We have the riffles and pools; we brought back a much better ecological community there.”
In the second year after implementation, Connick and the students were back using Leaf Pack to monitor the stream. “We’re hoping that it did make a difference,” says Connick. And maybe it has. “We’ve seen lots more macroinvertebrates in our leaf packs than there were before the practices were implemented.”
Checking Their Work
John Jackson at the Stroud Water Research Center says using Leaf Pack effectively does not demand absolute precision. “It’s pretty much impossible for a volunteer to make a bad stream look good,” he says, because volunteers “can’t record diversity that they don’t see.” To the contrary, he says, volunteers would probably have more of a tendency “to underestimate water quality by grouping things together that actually belong to different classes.”
Nonetheless, Jackson says what’s asked of students or volunteers “is not to be entomologists, but to be able to tell apart general classes.” And that task is simplified by the illustrated dichotomous keys included in the kits.
Connick believes his students do a thorough job, but he says that class schedules present the biggest challenge. To fit the analysis into class time, he says, is a little tricky, “so I just plan on staying after school.” He says with the help of volunteers who are familiar with the Leaf Pack system, “We work our way through whatever the kids don’t finish.”
He says, “I’m very confident that the data that we get is good scientific data. We use biological keys—dichotomous keys, such as whether an organism has wings or not—and by working our way down, we’re able to eventually get to the specific organism. If we’re not sure, looking at an organism, we’ll spend the time looking through the books.”
Focused Volunteers
“Volunteer groups, citizen groups, and schools are generally issue-oriented, or site-oriented,” says Jackson. “They are interested in a stream at their school, a new development that’s going in, or some focal point in a community.”
He says the real strength of the tool is that it helps these concerned citizens understand the important relationship between forests and streams. “The research tells you where the natural forests are intact; the streams are better able to handle the pollutants.”
Looking at the role leaves play in a stream’s ecology puts the spotlight on those streamside forests, and it highlights the effects of “what we’re doing next to the stream, and upland of the stream,” says Jackson.
“The state is charged with monitoring thousands of miles of streams on a very limited budget,” he notes. He says volunteer programs such as Leaf Pack can serve as “an extra pair of eyes” for the professionals.
“If something is going on and a volunteer group draws their attention to it, then they have the ability to add a few sites and pay attention to the dynamic that, otherwise, they might have missed.”
No Access
Charlie Graham teaches fourth grade at Forest Grove Community School in the town of Forest Grove, OR, about 30 miles west of Portland. He says the school strives to connect its teaching as much as possible to the local environment and the local community. “Our school is mandated to be a half-day out of the classroom, so we’re walking around the community all the time.”
It’s a rural community, close to nature. “We look up at hills all around us, and there are forested areas all around,” says Graham.
But when he came to Forest Grove two years ago with experience using Leaf Pack at his previous school, he faced a challenge using the program with his new students: He lacked access to a stream.
Logging is a major industry in the area, and Graham says there were some issues he could see with the woodlands as well. “There is a lot of clear-cut that we’ve seen just in the last few years on the hillsides—and erosion from runoff.” He needed to find a stream, and preferably one with some trees nearby.
A Meeting of Minds
Graham learned of a timber operator named Peter Hayes who ran a pioneering sustainable forestry company not far from Forest Grove. Hayes had recently completed some stream restoration projects in his 780 acres of forest.
Hayes calls his operation, Hyla Woods, “the forest equivalent of the family farm.” He says the company “takes a holistic view of value. Our focus is on growing ecologically complex forests that are also economically viable.” For Hayes, value is “not just board footage of logs grown,” but includes the spectrum of “services” an ecologically sound forest provides.
One of the forests Hayes manages shelters a headwater to the Mahalen River, home to the federally protected Coho salmon. “Quite a bit of energy goes into dealing with that listing, but also trying to improve and maintain the overall health of the whole landscape, particularly the aquatic system,” he says.
Apart from complying with regulations, Hayes says maintaining an ecologically sound forest is good for business. “A lot of our customers buy wood from us because they know that we have salmon and interesting birds. In a way, they pay for that ecosystem service through choosing to buy wood from us. It’s becoming clear that the investment in maintaining and building ecological value is tied to the economic viability of the
business.”
Although Hayes regularly works with professionals from government and universities to monitor stream flow and temperature, and even to study “amphibians both aquatic and terrestrial,” on the property, he notes, “We could always use more information. We’re looking for someone who can help us understand the health of the creek.”
After implementing two stream enhancement projects Hayes wanted to assess the impact of those efforts. “There’s always this assumption that doing ‘X’ is good, but we think we ought to be always trying to check whether our assumptions are valid or not. We want to check whether there are measurable results from the wood
placement.”
And Hayes, a schoolteacher turned forester who often sponsors community events in celebration of nature, adds, “We’re always interested in connecting with schools.”
Graham decided to make a connection. Soon, his fourth graders were on a bus headed toward the Hyla Woods stand, on the slopes of the Mahalen watershed—with their onion bags.
Making the Hidden Connections
“I like that when the school bus pulls up, and the kids get off, there’s no question about why they’re there—as opposed to the passive field trip where they come, and you stand there, and talk at them,” says Hayes. “I can be blunt with them and ask them, ‘Why are you here?’ They say, ‘We’re here to answer a question,’ and more often than not they’re able to tell me what that question is. It sends a message to the kids that they’re not practicing at being scientists—they’re real scientists, who are there for a real reason.”
He adds, “It’s as if we’re the client, and the students and teacher are the contractor.”
But it’s not all work and no play. “I think it’s also important for kids to just have idle time to explore and look around, instead of being dutiful and on task and standing there with their clipboard. They also have time to ask questions and go poke around and look at things,” says Hayes.
Graham says it can take time for the kids to warm to the idea of the bugs as well. “You get the standard reaction of ‘Eew, they’re bugs,’ or, ‘I’m not doing that.’ They’re not the most attractive looking insects.” But, he adds, “The reality is, once we get out there in the field, it’s one of the highlights of the year; they are all just absolutely engaged in what they’re doing, and they want it to be accurate.”
The exercise also teaches the students to take a holistic view of the ecosystem. “One of the real values is that they have to analyze the stream itself,” says Graham. “They have to look upstream for any disruptions—for anything manmade like a culvert or a dam, or anything that could be affecting the ecology. They’re looking at what the streambed is made of: Is it gravel? Is it rock? Concrete? The level of awareness is impressive.”
Graham says Leaf Pack ties in with a number of other environmental programs at Forest Grove. “We raise salmon and trout each year from eggs, and when they get big enough, we release them into our local streams.”
He says that when the students see the leaves “fall to the ground each winter and feed the soil and feed the stream,” they understand that the macroinvertebrates are eating the leaves, and that the fish are eating the macroinvertebrates. “So there is this energy flow connection that the kids have made through three different projects that I think are kind of brought together by Leaf Pack.”
Before using Leaf Pack, Graham says, “I didn’t have a huge connection to what those were in the water, and what fed them. But now, I don’t think I’ve ever been as effective in making that connection between healthy forests, healthy water, and healthy animals.”
Graham’s plan for the next five years is to take students to visit Hyla Woods to perform Leaf Pack experiments twice a year.
Hayes acknowledges that fourth graders can hardly be expected to perform high-level science, but he is happy to host them during their half-day field trips. “The reasons we’re doing it are more focused on the educational goals.” But, he adds, “They might find something that we hadn’t thought about.” Either way, he says it’s an important message to send: “We need them gathering new knowledge; that’s going to be important down the road.”
Jackson says Leaf Pack Network is “still evolving.” He adds that Stroud Water Research Center is “still doing work with leaf packs in different kinds of streams, comparing it to more standard sampling techniques. They are not identical, but it is a responsive technique; it differentiates between good streams and polluted streams.”
Nevertheless, Connick says he’s pretty impressed by the results in the classroom. “Kids really love it when we take those leaf packs in. They start to see the bugs moving—first of all, they don’t even think there are going to be any bugs—then all of a sudden these bugs start moving. It’s one of the first times in class that I have to tell them they need to go to their next class. They really get into it. They get excited about science.”
The data Graham and Connick’s students have collected, along with data from many others, who have used Leaf Pack, can be viewed on the Leaf Pack Network Web site at www.stroudcenter.org/lpn.