Go Green: Thut has full-circle experience with watershed monitoring

Just eight years ago Preble High School student Allison Thut worked with teacher Chris Hansel and a team of other students to monitor Baird Creek as part of the Lower Fox River Watershed Monitoring Program(LFRWMP).

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Less than a decade later, Hansel and Thut are now peers, and Thut, a science teacher at Pulaski High School, works with her own students (above) to monitor Trout Creek with a teacher and students from Oneida High School. Hansel(pictured) continues to lead the program for Preble.

Annette Pelegrin, UW-Green Bay’s Watershed Outreach and Education Specialist and coordinator of the annual Watershed Symposium today (April 8, 2014) said it is great to see high school participants maintain continuity and passion for the program at a professional level.

“Allison (who graduated from UWGB in 2011) has passion and experience with water quality because for three summers she worked as an intern on the Green Bay Metropolitan Sewage District research vessel that monitors water quality in Green Bay (relating to the recent Green Bay Dead Zone stories),” Pelegrin said. “The program has come full circle!”

More than 90 teachers and students from 11 area high schools participated in the 11th annual daylong symposium, which allows students to share their findings about improving stream health with professional researchers in water quality fields. Highlights include student presentations and poster sessions in the morning, an afternoon tour of the UW-Green Bay campus (including a trip to the Richter Museum of Natural History) and a special “Birding with Bob” campus field trip featuring UW-Green Bay’s nationally renowned ornithologist, Prof. Robert Howe.

The keynote speaker for the event was UW-Green Bay alumnus Dan Cibulka ‘09, an aquatic ecologist with the environmental management firm Enterra, LLC.