Teen scientists help park research

With limited resources and budgets, Glacier National Park was having a hard time keeping track of the animals within its borders a few years ago.

Park officials didn’t know how many animals it had, whether their habits and habitats were changing or if they were healthy, said Jane Ratzlaff, executive director of the Glacier National Park Fund.

“We came forward and said we need to do some inventories, some long-term monitoring. But research is really, really expensive,” she said.

That’s why, in 2005, the Citizen Science program was born. By enlisting help from volunteers, Glacier Park was able to establish inventory baselines for several species, including common loons, mountain goats and pikas.

Hundreds of participants have been trained to collect data in the park.

In the last year, those numbers have included high school students in a pilot program designed to transform teenagers into Citizen Scientists.

The park had worked with out-of-area schools before, program coordinator Jami Belt said. Last summer a group from the Elementary Institute of Science in San Diego capped a semester-long study of climate change by taking a field trip to Glacier Park.

The park accommodates a few such requests every year, Belt said, but wanted to do more to get local students involved.

“Basically we expanded the program this year so we could have a little more time for coordination to work with [local] high school students,” she said. “In the past we were getting requests [from local schools] but weren’t able to meet them, since we weren’t having somebody in place during the shoulder season — just the summer.”

Glacier National Park Fund’s Discover Glacier program exists for students in kindergarten through 12th grade, but the program has been geared more toward elementary and middle-school students than high-schoolers, Ratzlaff said.

“Traditionally we’ve focused more on K-8 because we didn’t have a lot of high school interest. Basically we hike and show flowers [in the Discover Glacier program]. The high-schoolers wanted more learning,” she said.

“That’s where the Citizen Science program has helped us create more learning opportunities rather than the hikes or the tours.”

The Citizen Science program worked with students in Flathead High School’s International Baccalaureate Programme over the last year, Belt said.

“We trained them on the high-country program. We’re most interested in that because of the climate change issue,” she said. “We got them fully trained in monitoring mountain goats and pikas.”

Belt said she was hopeful a handful of Flathead students would continue their monitoring as a summer research project. When school resumes this fall, the students will get back to the park to collect more data and may begin to analyze that information.

The students also may get to work with more technology, Belt said.

“We hope to get them a little bit involved in GIS this fall,” she said. “They may also be doing some work with GigaPan.”

GigaPan technology creates extremely high-resolution photos that have been helpful in tracking changes in landscapes. Scientists are hopeful GigaPan might also be useful in wildlife studies, particularly involving mountain goats, Belt said.

“This is the first time a person had tested it for use with a wildlife survey,” she said.

Students will also have the opportunity to chart some of the park’s more stationary species. A $10,000 grant from the Unilever United States Foundation will be used to expand the Citizen Science invasive plants program, Belt said.

“We will incorporate a more diverse program including high school students,” she said.

That will include more students than those in Flathead High science classes, Ratzlaff said, including in communities west and east of Glacier Park.

Part of the Unilever grant will be put toward instituting an online training program so people can learn about invasive plants and data collection before they arrive at the park, Belt said. Current Citizen Science programs require a daylong training, and many visitors are unwilling to devote an entire day to a class, she said.

The grant also will support a curriculum the park has developed for high school students, Belt said. The curriculum will help students get involved in plant monitoring and discover how treatments affect invasive species over time. Grant money will also set up an online system that will allow students in different schools to interface with each other, Belt said.

Grants like this are crucial to the work Glacier National Park Fund does, and the Citizen Science program relies entirely on the money it receives from the nonprofit. A recent grant from Applied Materials also has boosted the program, and a grant from Plum Creek Timber Co. has helped the park fund provide busing to bring local students to the park on field trips, Ratzlaff said.

Glacier National Park Fund is committed to getting students involved in the park.

“High school students are our future stewards,” Ratzlaff said. “If we’re going to keep the park viable for the future, we need to get kids engaged and bonded with it.”

For additional information, visit www.glacierfund.org.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or by email at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.