The Big Plastic Count

This starts tomorrow. 

Sign up and get your survey recording form to stick by the bin.

It's the counting that counts.

Bugs Matter

There are concerns about the decline in insects.

We have signed up to Bugs Matter to help gather data.

Bugs Matter have produced an app and website.

Instructions of how to get involved:

Before making an essential journey, clean your front number plate. At the end of your journey, place the splatometer over the middle of your front number plate and count the number of squashed flies and other dead bugs you can see through the holes- zero splats still count! Remember to take a photo with the splatometer in place too. Then crucially – submit your count and photo using the app to record the information.

The survey runs from 1st June to 31st August when insects are most active and abundant.

Friends of the Earth Clean Air Pack

Ordered a Clean Air Schools pack which is being made available by Friends of the Earth to a small number of UK schools.

It arrived last week, and along with some stickers and lesson ideas, there were two special tubes which need to be installed in a location for 2 weeks and then sent back for analysis and to get the results. They come with special bar codes to add in the locations where they were placed.

I installed the tubes in two places on the school site: one close to the road that passes the school, and one in a quieter location in the Old Palace gardens. They are attached to trees about 7 feet up.
Can you spot one in the picture below?


Next week they will be taken down and returned to Friends of the Earth, and I'll share the outcomes here.
Always good to be involved in citizen science projects and help students see that we involve ourselves as widely as possible in interesting external projects.