Youth of Today, Leaders of Tomorrow
Restoration Director Lili Allala (left) explains monitoring techniques with Clarenze (center) and Kerséa (right)
This week I got the chance to visit the greenbelt and hang out with the teens in our summer Restoration BootCamp. We offered BootCamp this year in partnership with Camp Long and Cleveland High School’s STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) program, which offers classes that help students prepare for the high-tech careers that will help shape our future. Students spent the week in the greenbelt our Restoration Team getting hands-on training in forest restoration and monitoring techniques that pros use every day.
On the day I visited, the team was deep in the woods examining plants in their plot of land. I met Kerséa, a sophomore who also has a job this summer growing vegetables at the Rainier Beach Urban Farm. “We’re finding the percentage of the plants in each area,” she said. Each student had their own section of the plot marked by flagging and measuring tape and recorded how much of each plant species covered that area. Measuring “percent cover” is a way that scientists and other field technicians quantify the biodiversity of an area. In addition to measuring percent cover, our Restoration Team taught the students to identify native plants, analyze soil properties, and calculate the height of a tree.
Reflecting through art, Clarenze
Clarenze, also a sophomore, said this was the first time he’d done this kind of work. “I want to have experience working in nature,” he said. “It’s really fun.” Together, we hunted around for plants like salmonberry, horsetail, and piggyback in his section of the plot.
After spending Thursday removing English ivy, students took time to reflect on their experience with a art project (right). Their reflections will become part of a scrapbook of student work throughout the year to illustrate ways that environmental learning impacts our communities.
Next week, these students from Cleveland will spend their second week of BootCamp at Camp Long where they’ll learn about careers in urban forestry, environmental education, ecology, urban planning, and environmental justice.