July 2015

By Ann Regn, Virginia Department of Environmental Quality

At the State Fair of Virginia, September 25 – October 4, VMN sponsors and other state agencies are cooperating on a professionally-designed, multi-building exhibit called Living on the Water: Experience the Chesapeake Bay. Master Naturalists may sign up to guide State Fair visitors through displays about the ecology and resource management of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. 

Employees from the Department of Conservation and Recreation, the Department of Environmental Quality, the Department of Forestry, the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, the Department of Historic Resources, the Marine Resources Commission, the Soil and Water Conservation Districts, and the Virginia Museum of Natural History will also be volunteering at many of the stations in the exhibit, but need VMN volunteers’ help to share even more expertise and enthusiasm with visitors. There will be numerous stations that may be of interest to Master Naturalists, including topics such as native plants, watershed management, oyster ecology, conservation education, historic resources, and the Chesapeake Bay Agreement.

If there is a specific topic on which you would like to educate others, or if there is a topic that you want to avoid, please leave a comment. Effort will be made to accommodate your interests. Prior to the Fair you will have an opportunity to view a webinar and will receive talking points and background information for your station; therefore, previous experience with each topic is not required. Each volunteer will receive a parking pass, an entry ticket and earn 7 hours of volunteer hours (4.5 hours for work at the fair and 2.5 hours for prep and reporting). Please consider signing up for a shift at the State Fair—the Bay will thank you!

To sign up for a volunteer slot, go to http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f0449aea62ea3f85-state and sign up before September 8.

Article by Kathy Fell, VMN-Southwestern Piedmont Chapter

If you look behind the Martinsville Branch of the Blue Ridge Regional Library, you will find a new habitat demonstration garden where there used to be a lawn.  Martinsville Branch Manager, Jim Woods, is looking forward to using the garden as a teaching tool to “make our patrons and guests aware of the wonder just outside the big bay window in the Family Fun Zone …and encourage inquiry about the plants and animals seen living in our backyard.”  This new “Secret Garden” is a collaboration between the local Library, the Southwestern Piedmont Chapter of the Virginia Master Naturalist Program and the Habitat Partners© Program of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (VDGIF). 

The garden includes about two dozen species of colorful native plants such as milkweeds, bee balm, and asters.  Species were selected to provide continuous bloom from spring to fall and include all colors of the rainbow.  These types of plants attract and provide food for important pollinators such as butterflies, moths and bees.  The insects, in turn, will attract many birds that rely on this source of protein to feed their young.

The idea for the garden dates back to September 2012 at the Virginia Master Naturalist state conference.  The Library grounds were used as a possible habitat improvement site for a class taught by Carol Heiser, Education Manager and Habitat Education Coordinator at VDGIF.  A Chapter member, Jim Tobin, attended that class.  This year, he approached the library with a few others from the Chapter to see if we might implement some of the ideas. 

VDGIF provided training and technical assistance to the Master Naturalists in the early stages of the project.  The garden, designed by Chapter member Kathy Fell, replaces all the grass with a pollinator garden and discovery trail.  Storm water run-off and erosion were issues on the site.  The central and lower areas of the garden are graded to mimic the function of a rain garden.  A true rain garden is sized according to the volume of rain calculated to run off a site during a storm event and is constructed using a special soil mix that helps to quickly absorb the rainwater within a few days.  The space at the library was not large enough to accommodate a fully engineered rain garden.  Instead, the design includes smaller water retention areas at both the top and the lower part of the garden, to be planted with wet-loving native plant species.

We are pleased to announce that we have our first set of new curriculum resources available!  These resources are designed for use with the VMN basic training course, but they are freely available to other volunteer programs and organizations as well.  

The curriculum project came about as a result of the VMN needs assessment and strategic plan, which identified the need for more standardized curriculum resources that could be used flexibly by chapters as a top priority for the program.  Developing these resources has been one focus of the Special Projects Coordinator position (Michelle Prysby).  

Our overarching goals for the project include enhancing learning by enabling chapters to include more hands-on activities in their courses, improving volunteer retention by clearly tying the training content to typical volunteer projects VMNs might do, and meeting the varying training needs of our diverse chapters.  

For each topic, the lengthy curriculum development process includes gathering input from program stakeholders and subject matter experts from across the state, redefining learning objectives to be more specific and more tied to volunteer projects, choosing the best existing readings and other resources to provide to VMN volunteers, developing new resources such as presentations and videos, developing lesson plans for hands-on activities that match the learning objectives, and developing appropriate assessment questions that chapters can use with their volunteers.

Our first topic to be released is “Urban and Developed Systems Ecology and Management“.  We chose this topic because we had funding for the project from the Virginia Department of Forestry’s Urban and Community Forestry grant program.  In addition, we learned from talking with chapters that many of them were not teaching this topic because they thought it did not pertain to their geographic area or because they did not have an instructor or resources for the topic.  We hope that these new resources demonstrate the relevance of this topic across all of Virginia and help volunteers learn more about it.  To find the new learning objectives and resources for this topic, navigate to http://www.virginiamasternaturalist.org/urban-and-developed-systems.html.   

We are developing resources for additional curriculum topics as we receive funding for this project.  Resources for our next set of topics (Forest Ecology and Management, Wetlands Ecology and Management, Coastal and Estuarine Ecology and Management, and Aquatic Ecology and Management) will be completed in mid-autumn.  These topics are being funded by a grant from the Virginia Environmental Endowment.

We will be leading a continuing education webinar on September 30 at noon to provide VMN training chairs and committee members and any other interested volunteers with training on exactly what new resources are available and how you can use them.  

Finally, we also would like to announce that a background reading for the topic of American Naturalists is now available.  This manuscript was in the works long before our strategic plan or new curriculum project; we have not yet addressed the American Naturalists topic within our new curriculum resource framework.  The reading, however, remains relevant to the VMN basic training, and we think it will serve as a useful resource for volunteers.  Thanks to the lead author, Amber Parker (Executive Director, Chincoteague Bay Field Station) for sharing her expertise and bringing this manuscript to fruition.

Installing tree or plant identification trails is a common project for VMN chapters.  Thanks to donations from VMN volunteers to our annual campaign, we now have a way to link those projects together and connect them to the VMN program as a whole.  We have established a presence with PlantsMap, a Virginia-based company that produces plant tags with QR codes and an online space to host information about plant identification trails and the individual plants on them.  VMN chapters conducting these kinds of projects can now order PlantsMap tags with the Virginia Master Naturalist logo.  Volunteer donations covered the set-up fee.  Their projects can be linked to the program online, so that one can visit PlantsMap.com and search for all plant collections associated with Virginia Master Naturalists.  

The Headwaters Chapter was one of the first chapters to pilot the use of PlantsMap since we set up the logo option.  For their spring project, the Headwaters basic training class identified trees at Cooks Creek Arboretum, part of the Bridgewater town park system.  Their goal was to provide accurate on-site tree identification and information about these resources to educate and inform the public who utilize this area.  Under the guidance of Adam Downing (Senior Extension Agent with the Virginia Cooperative Extension office), the trainees identified major tree species and installed PlantsMap signage.  Besides name identification, the signs include digital QR codes that lead the user to more information about the species and GPS based identification online.  As the Tree ID Team shared, ”Our hope is that visitors will appreciate knowing what trees they are looking at and something about each of them.”

Several other chapters are now using this plant tagging resource.  We encourage additional chapter projects that choose to use PlantsMap to connect with the Virginia Master Naturalist statewide program’s logo and identity on the site.