In an effort to generate interest in science among disadvantaged middle-schoolers, Florida Gulf Coast University teamed up with the Naples Botanical Garden to offer a unique summer program.
The mission of the Naples Botanical Garden Middle School Science Academy: explore the impact of fire on flora and fauna and the interactions of humans with fire at the Collier Seminole State Park south of Naples.
“We were getting the kids to think about relationships of plants and animals and fire, and people and fire,” says Brian
Bovard, an assistant professor of environmental studies, who spearheaded the program. “We wanted them to realize they were going to be doing real science. It wasn’t about coming in and playing around.”
Typically, this type of program is offered to middle-school students who excel at the previous year’s science fair. But this experience was open to children who hadn’t had such opportunities before, those from lower-income households and two of Collier County’s least affluent schools, Avalon Elementary and Shadowlawn.
Ten students, all about 12 years old, participated in the program, which was a joint undertaking of the garden and FGCU, which operates the Harvey Kapnick Research & Education Center there. Funding came from the Naples Children & Education Fund and from FGCU’s Whitaker Center for STEM Education, which promotes the teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
A mix of faculty from the middle schools, FGCU and the botanical garden worked with the students on the project that sought to answer park managers’ questions about the density of pine trees and saw palmettos on the Naples property, Bovard says. What is the appropriate density, and when should controlled burns be conducted to keep the growth from becoming too dense and turning into a fire hazard?
“They need that information to manage the system,” Bovard says, “but most fire research has been conducted in north Florida. Our systems are different.”
So the young researchers spent four days in the field collecting samples of soil, insects and plants they brought back to the Kapnick Center to analyze.
The samples were taken from two areas that had burned, one recently, another several years ago, Bovard says. “We were looking at the differences in soil moisture, differences in plant communities and animal species present in those two locations, so we could assess the impacts of the fire on those two areas.”
The park staff routinely burns sections of the park to keep it from getting overgrown but doesn’t have sufficient resources to assess the impact of those fires. This research helped provide some of that information.
“At the end of the program, they had to give presentations that are analogous to what scientists give at professional meetings, including a poster with results,” Bovard says. “They presented to younger campers (in other programs at the garden) as well as their parents.”
The students, who were going into seventh grade, were a little younger than those Bovard typically works with when conducting programs for the science fair participants.
“A number of them were just excited about everything we showed them regardless of what it was,” he says. “Some had never seen an alligator in the wild before. One day we saw an 8-foot gator in a small pond. They were completely mesmerized. We put out microscopes one day and they had a blast doing that.
“Although it didn’t have anything to do with the research, we decided to do some dip netting and see what kind of critters we could find. We brought the students to Alico Arena and the Egan Observatory and gave them a tour of campus. Everything we did was a ‘gee whiz’ kind of experience for them.”
Also helping with the program were Brenda Thomas, an FGCU Colloquium instructor and FGCU environmental science students Monica Scroggins and Anastasia Jenney.
Bovard hopes that FGCU students will continue the research so that the park managers will have better information on how best to manage the park’s resources. Bovard says they hope to expand the summer program to four weeks next year.