This year in Keeping It Green, my class learned about biodiversity in Lowell. Biodiversity is how many plants and animals are in one ecosystem. The more diverse an ecosystem is, the healthier it is. As a class and individually we would do field work finding the specific names and genus of plants and animals. For plants, we would use an app called “LeafSnap” which would allow us to photograph plants and the app would automatically identify the plant through the picture. While identifying all these different species you get to see how diverse the area is to all these amazing trees, plants, flowers.
We would take walks to where the Concord River just about meets the Merrimack River. These walks would show us all of the birds that rely on the rivers for them to survive. The Great Blue Heron makes the rivers and other surrounding bodies of water its home. The Great Blue Heron is a very tall bird who spends its life in or near water. The bird feeds on fish and nests in trees or large bushes. We would learn all of this information by seeing the birds in person then going back home and learning about them through official websites.
Some challenges I faced this term was going full remote, this really made it less fun because I can only learn things online instead of in person. I have grown as a “citizen scientist” because I now know so much about biological things in our environment, Keeping It Green has really helped with that. If I could tell the world one thing about our class it could be that it was surprisingly fun and it was very informative. The class was just really interesting to follow and learn things that you can actually see if you just take a walk down the street.
I chose this picture because it shows that life can grow anywhere in any situation. In this picture it shows a plant growing through a fence to reach sunlight