Last fall, students from St. John Paul II School – a Catholic prep school in Hyannis – spoke to a small crowd at Barnstable Land Trust’s Eagle Pond Sanctuary, in Cotuit. They talked about a floating garden they constructed and installed on the pond, that also served as an outdoor laboratory throughout the summer.
"It was very cool to see how it became incorporated into the environment here," senior Anna Schlegel told the gathered community members. "There definitely was an impact. I did see that decline in phosphate and nitrogen."
Anna was among the students who visited the Eagle Pond site throughout the summer, conducting a nutrient reduction study. It was the culmination of a project that started at the end of the previous school year.
The last month of school can be pretty chill for students taking Advanced Placement (AP) classes. AP final exams are over by mid-May, but the school year extends to the middle of June. To fill the void, AP Environmental Science teacher Shannon Gilliland assigned a project to give her students some real-world experience: building, installing, and monitoring the floating garden.
"It was just a very cool experience for the students where they took their exam, and then they weren't done," Gilliland said. "They had to actually do something, citizen science, hands-on, to do something [to] make a difference in their community."
It turned out to be a lesson in civics and green infrastructure, as well as environmental science.
"Working with the town and Marine and Environmental Affairs and getting a permit and all of these things, like the kids got to be part of every step of the process," said Gilliland.
The project was the brainchild of Alice Marcus-Krieg. She’s the Open Space Planner and Grant Coordinator for the Town of Barnstable.
"We very quickly did the permitting, made a partnership with Shannon at the JPII High School, got kids on board, did crowdsourcing for materials, and literally from April until June, designed it, permitted it, constructed it, and got it in the water," said Marcus-Krieg.
The idea behind the floating pond is to address eutrophication in Cape Cod’s freshwater ponds.
"Eutrophication is a process in which excess nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphate from fertilizers, will get into water systems," student Anna Schlegel explained. "And that causes algae blooms."
Those algae blooms can block sunlight and eat up oxygen that’s vital to pond life. Eagle Pond does not suffer from algae blooms, but it was a good proof-of-concept site, according to Barnstable Land Trust Executive Director Janet Milkman.
"It's one of our larger properties and one, maybe the only one, where we have a pond that's completely surrounded by our land and where there's very easy access to the pond," Milkman said.
That access was necessary for students who installed the floating garden last spring and tested the water around the garden throughout the summer.
But first, it had to be built. Graham Construction donated the wood and students like Shane Heywood learned how to put it together.
"We built the structure in the parking lot with Mullen Construction," Shane said. "It was a very fun opportunity. We got to cut some boards, measure things, and make sure all the pieces were fit for the structure."
The structure is a seven-foot octagon, big enough to hold 15 water-loving native plants, donated by Agway of Cape Cod. But how do you make something like that float without introducing plastics or chemicals into the pond?
Wine corks – lots of them, according to student Sophie Philbrick.
"They had about 8,000 corks that we collected," Sophie said. "We had people from all across our school bring them in. And then when we got to the pond, we placed a net underneath and stapled it around. And then poured all of the corks evenly. And then put another piece of netting above it."
The plants were nestled into the corks and Marcus-Krieg said they thrived.
"The plants did amazing," she said. "They were very, very happy. It was cardinal flower and junkus, which is a wet loving grass, and then sweet flag ... [a type of] iris. So it was awesome."
The garden was pulled from the water and partially deconstructed last fall. Gilliland says this year’s AP Environmental Science class will be reviving it this spring. And there's a possibility they'll be adding to it, if Marcus-Krieg gets her way.
"We aim to reconstruct it as soon as the weather gets nice," said Marcus-Krieg. "I have to go through permitting again. I'd love to do an additional octagon tied to it and make the footprint bigger. We'll see what permitting has to say about that."
She says expanding the garden could yield some valuable research results as well.
"It'll be interesting to see, last year and this year," she said. "... With more square footage of vegetation, does that affect the sampling?"
And even though it’s extra work, the students like Anna, who were in Gilliland’s class last year, say it was worth the effort.
"The project definitely went a little bit longer than the class did," she said with a smile. "But it’s so cool to see and actually participate in the community and the environment and see what we can do."
Her classmate Sophie agrees.
"When you’re in an environmental science class you don’t always get the chance to actually go out and do stuff," she said. "Like, most the time it’s just learning. And I think that it was really cool to actually have an impact on the environment and to see how what we learned in class could be applied to the real world."
And as these seniors look forward to graduation, they have some unique skills they can add to their resumes.
