Citizen Science on Marine Plastic Pollution in Newfoundland and Labrador K-12 Schools

MUN’s Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), lead by Dr. Max Liboiron, has developed a number of technologies and protocols for everyday people (“citizen scientists”) to monitor local marine plastic pollution. Our projects include protocols for monitoring shoreline plastics with a phone app, build-it-yourself surface trawls (with two levels of difficulty), and a protocol for looking for plastics in the digestive tracts of fish.
Working with Let’s Talk Science, CLEAR adapted these technologies and protocols for a junior high and high school audience; we created a curriculum guide for teachers so they can integrate the projects into NL curriculum requirement, built kits with some of the basic materials for building or carrying out monitoring activities with printed curriculum guides and instruction sheets, and made a public web platform for students and teachers with teaching tools, videos, resources, and to share their results with researchers and each other.
The website is here: http://explorecuriocity.org/Explore/ArticleId/5934/monitoring-marine-pla...
Kits went out to 20 junior and high school teachers and teaching programmers in Newfoundland and Labrador in August 2017.
This project is complete.