Cascade Citizens Wildlife Monitoring Project
Curriculum for the Bioregion (Olympia, WA: Washington Center for Improving the Quality of Undergraduate Education, 2009).
29 Pages Posted: 25 Oct 2013
Date Written: June 25, 2009
Abstract
Wildlife tracking can make an excellent service-learning activity for engaging anthropology, biology and environmental science/studies students in their local communities and ecosystems. This project describes an advanced project for a well-developed field school as well as possible entry-level activities that would be easier to integrate into a wide variety of courses. The Cascade Citizens Wildlife Monitoring Project (CCWMP) is a service-learning activity through which students in the Learn and Serve Environmental Anthropology Field (LEAF) School draw upon traditional ecological knowledge and observation skills to help solve a modern problem. The LEAF School employs service-learning as a form of participant observation through which students can come to better understand their own community, its subcultures and its interconnectedness within an ecosystem. In the winter students assist the I-90 Wildlife Bridges Coalition with documentation of wildlife presence and movements along the primary east-west route across the Cascade Mountains. During the spring, summer and fall students collaborate with Conservation Northwest and Wilderness Awareness School to set up remote cameras to document the presence of rare carnivores in the Cascades. The 2009 LEAF School students are helping to place, set up and check cameras targeted for documentation of reported wolf sounds and sightings in the vicinity of Manastash (south of Cle Elum, WA). The data collected by students is shared with government officials, environmental organizations and land managers to help guide the protection of wildlife corridors and the placement of freeway crossings.
Keywords: Wildlife Tracking, Cascade, Citizen Science, Environmental Anthropology, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Conservation Northwest, Wilderness Awareness School, Manastash, I-90 Wildlife Bridges Coalition, Road Ecology, Service-Learning
JEL Classification: I21, N5, Z10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation