Programs

In this program, students will learn all about prairie fire ecology. This program covers indigenous uses of fire, how fire keeps the prairie healthy, and how scientists today use fire to restore and conserve prairie ecosystems. This program includes a brief lesson on prairie fire ecology, some indigenous folklore, and a hands-on experiment where students get to build and set their own model prairie fires.

Lake Michigan is an extraordinary and precious resource, and this beach-based field trip gives students a hands-on look at how it came to be. Through a model glacier demonstration, a dunes walk, and a rock and fossil collection hunt along the shoreline, students learn how glacial advance and retreat carved the Great Lakes basin and left behind the fossils, moraines, and dunes we can still find today.

The goal of this program is to educate students about the importance of watersheds and how human activities can severely impact them. This is a group-centered role play activity where students take on the roles of different stakeholders to explore how individual and community decisions affect water quality and ecosystem health downstream.

This presentation-based program is focused around educating students about river ecosystems, research done in rivers, and Illinois wildlife. Best-suited for middle school students, the program includes a general overview of the topics discussed above, as well as a game during which students group up with whiteboards and identify wildlife from camera trap images (images courtesy of Urban Rivers). Extra camera trap images included in zip.

The goal of this program is to educate students about Illinois bat species, echolocation, acoustic monitoring, and acoustic bat call identification. This is generally a higher level program meant for high school aged students or adults. The program is presentation-based and includes a general introduction to the afore-mentioned topics as well as a bat call identification game towards the end of the slides. A acoustic ID guide is also included to give as a handout during the game.

The goal of these materials is to give anyone (even someone new to iNaturalist) the required tools to not only lead a Bio-Blitz, but provide interesting results for the participants in the form of statistical graphs. This program includes instructions for project creation, instructions for how to make an iNaturalist observation (meant to be distributed to participants), example data from a bio-blitz I ran in 2025, and R code to generate plots directly from the iNaturalist output data.