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Stewardship
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.
Center partners are the many groups that regularly use the Millers River Environmental Center at 100 Main Street in downtown Athol, MA. They include The Trustees of Reservations, New England Forestry Foundation, Millers River Watershed Council, Millers River Greenway, Millers River Basin Team, Millers River Chapter of Trout Unlimited, New England Equestrian Center, Frontier Club, Kingsman Chess Club, and the North Quabbin Regional Landscape Partnership. As managers of the Center, the Athol Bird and Nature Club is responsible for communicating with existing and potential partners, managing use of the meeting spaces and offices at the Center, and facilitating collaborative programming. If your organization wishes to meet at the Center please call 978-248-9491 to discuss your needs or to reserve space.
In collaboration with Appalachian Mountain Club, the Center holds an Outdoor Expo on the second Saturday in January. In collaboration with the Millers River Watershed Council, we host a River Celebration on the second Saturday in April.
New England Forestry Foundation and the Athol Bird and Nature Club work together to train area guide in leadership skills and in the cultural and natural history of the region. We also develop guided adventures at and near the Tully Campground in Royalston with The Trustees and the US Army Corp of Engineers. Individuals and organizations can contact the Center to arrange for special guided tours of the region. If you are interested in learning more about guide training options,or plan to visit north central Massachusetts and want a guided tour, we can assist you. Please call 978-248-9491 for further information.
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.