This is technically the page we’re on now, but we’re currently far from seeing its final form. This page will be the home base of the wider endeavor, which is itself a “communication project.”
Our open-ended endeavor(s) is to figure out what different subjects are most of interest to us to learn about, and to figure out what all we can organize and build to help us learn it. … We’ve already sort of started doing this as a team! We’ve been holding once-a-month meetups at different natural spaces throughout the Upper Valley, guided by an educator or topic specialist of some sort to help support learning toward specific topics (so far, different topics each time). That activity represents our starting place, but with the interest and enthusiasm and numbers so far cultivated throughout the meetup series (and wider Salamander Team volunteer project), we have a sizeable little party of people with which to brainstorm some fancier opportunities for the community…
What kind of fancier opportunities? … Not sure yet! The Salamander Team is currently composed of at least a couple hundred people clustered and scattered remotely throughout the Upper Valley and some neighboring towns. When we had wasp stings at the July event, we had (more than) 2 Registered Nurses in attendance, and had an educator in local medicinal plant properties. In our wider Salamander Team community, we have educators and and research and medical professionals… we have conservation scientists and advocates that are in cool random countries around the world every time you hear from them… we have participants from local nonprofit staff, and from public school and university faculty, and independent falconers. Between the perspectives that’ve so far shown up in this still-growing community, we have some exciting potential for building nice things.
Should we focus on a specific topic with this project? Maybe “Plant Identification in the Upper Valley…”
There’s an argument to be made in favor of designing a structured learning-system for ALL of the topics, ignoring subject-matter as a criteria… an example alternative could be to invest our time and attention in specific locations, almost like “Ecology of the Hartford Town Forest.” Then we could invite facilitators with different specializations for guided walks in that forest, for numerous different angles on the same locale.
Since we have iNaturalist freely available, and the Vermont Atlas of Life project on there is quite intuitively setup for this region (thanks to Hartford’s own nonprofit, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies) we could brainstorm ways to build iNat either into the guided meetups themselves, or even into a remote component that we could each pursue on our own in between meetups. As a group we could meet in a classroom or online to explore the common and rarer species that have so far been observed in local habitats.. the conversation could also extend to what species are proposed to live in nearby habitats, but have yet to be recorded for science.
Remotely, we could establish homework assignments (could call ’em “Missions,” or “Hunts,” or Quests, or bounties that earn participants rewards that we have yet to come up with), like: use iNaturalist to identify three fungi species on the Ledges Trail of the Quechee Section 5 Wilderness. That kind of thing would have the advantage of helping us to familiarize ourselves with local trail systems and the public natural assets we have throughout the neighborhood. We could also do some work to highlight every time someone observes something particularly rare or otherwise interesting.. like a cool entomophagic cordyceps or big fishies or basically anything weird.
So… as we think about “Building a Structured Learning Program” its fun and maybe productive to ponder the simple more habit-shaped things we can implement. Like fitting in an extra hike, and keeping iNaturalist in mind for it, and maybe aiming to make a certain number of observations of a certain number of species in this or that genus.
This is all prelude to a conversation where we ask “if there was a university level Introduction to Field Botany Course in the Upper Valley, would you be interested in enrolling?”
There’s a specific set of recommended tools for any endeavor, of course including the broad range of outdoor recreational “things” we each most enjoy doing. Fungi and medicinal plant foraging, cataloging (often photographing) flora and fauna in our local landscapes, hiking (snowshoeing, cross country skiing), Herping, amphibian-crossing-guarding, so on (we should grow this list.. if you love doing something, you’re encouraged to share it)… these are all assisted by the right tools.
The Salamander Team doesn’t have a store, even tho our logo looks nice on the couple of coffee mugs we had made as a science experiment, but we do want to make it easy for community members to have a sense of how to be best equipped for our projects and adventures. This “Toolkit” will likely just start as a list, but will hopefully grow into a thoroughly linked/inter-connected resource bank.
This Toolkit will begin focused primarily on physical equipment, and will expand over time to connect to different kinds of resources. There are a wide variety of writers and video (like youtube) makers and other educators that have already developed amazing educational resources online and in physical forms, and we’ll be doing our best to figure out how to best position those teachers and their tools relative to our many individual goals.
- Dichotomous Keys
- iNaturalist
- Photography / Camera
- Macro lens attachment for specimens __<2cm
- Tele lens for birds and fauna
- Journaling + Note-taking
- Equipment for adventures
- Priorities:
- Headlamp
- Footwear (probably sandals unless its winter)
- Warmth
- Clothing choices to meet your body’s needs
- Hand Lens
- Auxiliary:
- Handheld microscope
- Journal (note taking strategies for specific taxa)
- Telescope (for our currently imaginary astronomy club, the Hartford All-Star Team)
- Priorities:
P.s. This Toolkit isn’t so much about brand recommendations, but it’d be cool if there are local makers we’d be able to boost. Can see this being most doable maybe with things like foraging baskets and mushroom knives. If we’re encouraging people buying stuff, we’d like to facilitate good shopping. Any recommendations for exceptional makers of any of the items listed would be much appreciated!
The event page is now up to date, with the rough outline of November’s meetup included. At present, we meet only once monthly, pretty reliably on the last Sunday of the month. We have the intention to build new ways to help us each learn about the natural sciences, using as best we can our local natural spaces. There are a million ways we could do this, and choosing how best to invest our time and attention and resources is the game.
Each monthly meetup is built around a different wide topic, with phenology helping us to choose what would be good to talk about each month. One train of thought worth pondering is what more we can do with the events we already do… “how to accomplish field work learning objectives within the 2-3 hour excursion we already do each month.” The ponder after that one would then be, “what new meetups/events/workshops/gatherings should we plan.” We’re also talking about organizing different kinds of events for the Salamander Team and wider Upper Valley, like music nights since so many of us like to play instruments and/or sing.. or remote meetups, where we’re all tuning in from our own homes, some being aggressively over-competitive about science trivia.
One proposed thing that we could build to support our current monthly meetups would be a framework of “Seeking Objectives” – some concrete assignments for people to accomplish within each of the different natural spaces we visit each month. Continuing that brainstorm, “Seeking Objectives” could be designed for each of our different public natural spaces (town forests, wildlife preserves, public conservation lands), but also for the specific habitats within each. They could get pretty specific.. like “photograph 2 relatives of lawn grass within a Sugar Maple-Ostrich Fern Riverine Floodplain Forest.” Deciphering jargony riddles might become part of the activity.
Taking that framework beyond just our monthly-meetups, we could make a system where the Salamander Team organizes specific assignments through the weeks and months that would expose participants to new perspectives on local natural spaces. Objectives would also make sense to be phenological – “go up on this fire tower and use binoculars to find 3 raptor species in their southward migration in September.” If we could position the Objectives we come up with to provide concrete steps forward in the direction of broader learning goals, then maybe we’ll be better off in the wider quest of creating a sense of community around individual, independent learning.
Continuing the conversation about building new events to support new educational goals… Salamander Team members have some rigorous ambitions for what we will be able to accomplish and create to help us learn what we want to learn. The Upper Valley is an exceptionally wealthy landscape in terms of the biodiversity in our natural surroundings. We have rare bogs. mountain vistas that barely require hikes, floodplain habitats and threatened amphibian redoubts, old and diverse forest.. and loads of new and somewhat monocultured forest, thanks to Vermont’s agricultural history.
We could spend infinite time looking at our region’s plants alone, and in so doing we could find innumerable rabbit holes to search regarding inter-species interactions and intra-organism interactions (and systems) – from big picture topics like broader ecology, to the ultra-microscopic, like the mechanisms behind photo-activity in the chemical compound that makes our landscapes green for a time each year (and then yellow, orange, reddish, and finally brown).
Considering the green season of 2023 as the prospective start time for field-activities, the Salamander Team is currently exploring the creation of a multi-part, multi-week, intensive program around “Plant Identification in the Upper Valley.” The scope and structure of the program are very much still in the planning and feedback stages. Even this topic, Plants of the Upper Valley, is chosen with the thought in mind that these steps we’re taking are experimental – to help us figure out what we could build and what it should look like.
With the plant diversity in just the Upper Valley, there’s so much to look at and talk about that we should be able to design lots of little tests to run in our upcoming 2023 year. It’ll be exciting to see how the resources we crowd-source can grow to advance our community’s educational goals – especially in the sciences!