The Center hosts and facilitates the Millers River Basin Team. This team is made up of individuals representing federal, state, and local agencies and organizations who meet monthly to discuss and plan for the protection and monitoring of the Millers River watershed. The Team keeps up to date information on issues related to watershed protection and assists in our volunteer monitoring efforts. The Center manages a wide range of volunteer monitoring programs. After annual training programs, volunteers do midstream surveys, habitat photodocumentation, stream continuity studies, and shoreline surveys. Data gathered through these monitoring protocols provide longterm data on the health of the watershed and alert authorities to possible problems or concerns. These efforts are fundid in part by the Greater Worcester Community Foundation.

Center staff, Club members, and volunteers continue to document the rich biodiversity of habitats within this region. Documenting odonates of the Millers River watershed and conducting species specific statewide survey are ongoing projects. The Center is currently conducting a scientific study lakes and ponds in our region that is funded by the Massachusetts Environmental Trust.

As part of a US Fish and Wildlife restoration project, Center staff managed the construction of an eel pass at the New Home Dam in Orange and will work with volunteers to monitor eel movement over the dam. In another restoration project, salmon fry, raised in Demil Kovacevic’s fifth grade classroom at Butterfield school in Orange, are released each spring into the Millers River. This project is jointly sponsored by the Athol Bird and Nature Club, the Millers River Watershed Council, Trout Unlimited, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The Center facilitates the implementation of Environment as Integrating Context (EIC), a national school reform program adopted by the state. Developing and training teachers to use schoolyard trails, outdoor study stations, and service learning projects is core to EIC implementation. We are teaming teachers in the Orange Elementary Schools, our region’s demonstration site for this initiative. The Warwick Community School, Athol-Royalston Schools, and others in our region work with staff and volunteers to spread EIC practices into other classrooms.

The Center runs and facilitates collaboratively designed teacher professional development workshops and seminars that enable teachers to develop community related studies. With time dedicated to curriculum design in these seminars, teachers can be sure that their students engage in projects that will meet state and local curriculum mandates. Our staff regularly co-teaches in classrooms with teachers in these programs, we provide materials for student projects and bring other community members into the classroom as local experts in the topic under study. The National Science Foundation funds our work with Harvard Forest that brings schoolyard studies to area schools that are modeled after research conducted by scientists at Harvard Forest.

Area teachers have requested additional trail development near their schools, enhancement of transitional habitats around the playgrounds for study sites, and that study sites be set up along nature trails. The Center staff facilitates such trail development and the purchase of native plants, nest boxes, and construction of small group study areas that can increase biodiversity and direct students to key study sites.

These school programs are primarily funded by the Massachusetts Environmental Trust and the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts. The Center provides volunteer training sessions and materials.

Please contact us if you would like to volunteer in one of these school programs.

We appreciate the cooperation of our neighbors: Mount Grace Land Trust, Northfield Bird Club, Northfield Mountain Recreation Center, Ware River Nature Club, Hampshire Bird Club for sharing their events with our members

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