By Nadia Scharf
On a chilly November afternoon, three dozen middle-schoolers stand in the golden light of the early-setting sun at Sensiba State Wildlife Area in Green Bay, listening as the instructor explains what they’re there to do. With the wind whipping around them and rattling the reeds by the water, it’s starting to get cold for the first time this year, and the dark won’t help.
But they signed up because they wanted to be outdoors, learning about the world outside their classrooms. So, when the instructor gives each of them a handful of wild rice seeds, the cold wind doesn’t bother them as they scatter the seeds across the still water.
“Nature is nice,” sixth-grader Franklin Clark-Willard said. “The Great Lakes give you a freeing feeling.”
These kids, students at Pulaski Community Middle School, are able to learn about Wisconsin’s water ecosystems thanks to an over $650,000 grant to the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay from Freshwater Collaborative, a statewide initiative connecting water researchers across the Universities of Wisconsin. Pulaski asked that the Green Bay Press-Gazette not use students’ names.
Green Bay is one of the biggest freshwater estuaries in the world, if not the biggest, said Emily Tyner, UWGB director of freshwater strategy. An estuary is where two distinct bodies of water come together; in Green Bay, that’s the Fox River and Lake Michigan. That drives local research, but UW researchers study water systems across the state.
Besides connecting kids with their environment via K-12 programming, Freshwater Collaborative’s grant program also funds college-level internships and research projects. At UWGB, that work is aiming to address the water issues that incoming generations, like the students at Sensiba State, will face, Tyner said.
“Water is the means to a healthy life for all of us,” said UWGB assistant professor Erin Berns-Herrboldt. “You need experts across public and private sectors that can help you make decisions about how to manage that.”
Covering research costs across Universities of Wisconsin
Freshwater Collaborative allows Berns-Herrboldt and her UW students to analyze how phosphorus builds up, which can lead to algae blooms. They canoe along the Wisconsin River, taking water samples to run numbers back at the lab.
It lets UWGB assistant professor Stephan Gunn and his students test how forever chemicals leach into soil, and it lets assistant professor Keir Wefferling investigate peat moss systems.
Part of that is the grant money to UWGB. But the other part is the collaboration inherent in the Collaborative: By working with other Universities of Wisconsin researchers, Green Bay professors have access to tools and expertise they normally wouldn’t. For example, UWGB doesn’t have the testing instruments Gunn needs for his research, but UW-Milwaukee does.
Freshwater Collaborative allows professors to teach expensive, “high-impact” learning opportunities, covering expenses like travel costs and extra faculty time.
Grant money also pays for college students to conduct professional-level research, which professors said means they’re much more likely to leave UWGB with a career opportunity lined up.
“The opportunities for students on this are incredible,” Berns-Herrboldt said. “They’re really big about getting as many students as possible … and paying them, which is an equity issue.”
Professional experience as a high school student
Some of those students have been working with water since high school, thanks to another aspect of Freshwater Collaborative at UWGB.
The High School Freshwater Scholars program allows students to participate in faculty research projects before they even start a degree. They gain hands-on experience and learn about different water careers, such as working in natural resource management or water engineering, Tyner said. That gives them a better sense of what they could do post-graduation.
UWGB student Digby Meister was a Freshwater Scholar before he started college, knowing he was interested in working in conservation. He spent the summer researching fish populations along Green Bay’s coast and working with wild rice, he said, which helped him get a handle on research methods and data collection for his later college classes.
Taking on field work that summer solidified for Meister that he wanted to work with wetlands as a career. It also led to a job as a research assistant, letting him work in a field he’s passionate about as a student, he said.
Field trips, water samples and loving plants
And then there’s the pre-college programs, like Sensiba State’s wild rice seeding. That, and similar programs, come from partnerships between Tyner at UWGB and K-12 educators. Tyner started the partnership program in 2020, and it will be funded through the Freshwater Collective grant to UWGB for six more years.
Through the program, students take field trips to plant crops like wild rice, remove invasive species and learn about water careers. About 2,000 students and 200 educators are involved, Tyner said.
Pulaski eighth-grades Jack Klarkowski, Elliott Wagner and Cody Van Haren said they’ve been taking field trips as part of the partnership program, called the Great Lakes Explorer Club at Pulaski, for three years. Getting to sail was their favorite, but it’s just nice to be outside, they said.
But sixth-grader Melody Rybicki wants to be outside for a different reason: She wants to be a botanist, she said. “I just think plants are really interesting.”
Another arm of the program came out of the Fox River cleanup. The goal was to give kids a “sense of stewardship” around cleaning the river, Tyner said. Students take water samples of local streams near their schools, using professional-grade equipment. The information they collect contributes to a 20-plus year data set on Green Bay-area water quality.
Programs at the K-12 level help kids understand local ecosystem concerns. They also help connect UWGB to the community, Tyner said, which is one of the university’s priorities.
Ultimately, professors said, the region, state and nation will need water experts in the future. They hope that through Freshwater Collaborative’s grant-funded projects, Green Bay will be able to support its wetlands and water systems amid questions about future use, brought up with things like data centers and depleted aquifers.
“When you’re talking about one of your most important resources, you need people that know all of the tradeoffs around making decisions related to that resource,” Berns-Herrboldt said. “That’s how I think about giving back to the community.”
Contact Green Bay education reporter Nadia Scharf at nscharf@gannett.com or on X at @nadiaascharf.
Source: ‘Nature is nice’: Universities of Wisconsin program connects K-12 students with water research