The last two weeks of September were filled with excitement and exploration across the tallgrass prairie as over 300 seventh grade students from a Lincoln Middle School visited for a pilot field trip program utilizing our new Wildlife Explorers curriculum.

The program highlights four careers and community roles (ornithologist, entomologist, botanist, and aquatic scientist) and has the students explore the prairie as each of these roles and complete real-world surveys for birds, invertebrate biodiversity, vegetation density, and water quality using scientific techniques. Specifically, students learned about birds and how to do a point count and sound map to estimate populations, used nets and collecting bags to count the types of invertebrates living in the tall grass, sampled water and the macroinvertebrates in it to equate to water quality, and measured the plant diversity and density of the prairie grasses and forbs.

The program is a pilot to test the curriculum, its connections to state science standards about ecosystems, and the logistics of field trips at the seventh-grade level. It is in partnership with Pioneers Park Nature Center, Lincoln Public Schools, the UNL FEWS program, and the Lower Platte South NRD.  Surveys and evaluations with the students, teachers, and partners will be gathered, and a second pilot with Moore Middle School will take place next spring at Pioneers Park Nature Center. The goal is to have all the seventh graders from Lincoln Public Schools be able to attend this field trip opportunity in 2027.