Nature Up North, A Microcosm of Learning
For nearly a decade, Nature Up North has connected people to the environment through citizen scientist projects and outdoor adventures. By engaging in hands-on activities and research, the community-based program, funded by support from Laurentians and foundations, has helped many discover the importance of protecting the wild things and places that call the North Country, "home."
“Nature Up North has created this little microcosm of learning for St. Lawrence University students and citizen scientists in all different ways,” says Erika Barthelmess, Piskor Professor of Biology and the project director of Nature Up North. “Engaging both students and the community is so exciting and makes the work so powerful.”
The power that Barthelmess is referring to is inherent in Nature Up North’s mission to foster a deeper sense of appreciation for and connection to the environment through research and engagement. She feels the various initiatives under the Nature Up North umbrella help create an informed commitment to protecting the wild things and wild places that define the North Country.
“The depth in which this project has impacted students across disciplines is exciting,” says Barthelmess. She explains that opportunities exist for students studying everything from computer science and digital media to biology and everything in between to connect their academic interests to the region.
Olivia Bernier ’24 is one example. Bernier is working on the North Country Wild project, part of Nature Up North’s efforts to collect comprehensive documentation of wildlife in the North Country. Bernier’s research focuses on forest ecology. She collects data on forest properties such as tree species, soil characteristics, ground vegetation, and forest structure and deploys game cameras to assess wildlife diversity and abundance in the forests.
Jane Krausman ’23 is another example. She combines data from game cameras with field surveys of tick abundance to study tickborne diseases, including Lyme disease. By observing the numbers of deer and small mammals, she can relate tick abundance to wildlife hosts. Alumni also continue to make contributions to the North Country Wild project.
Brett Ford ’14 is a data scientist at Embark Veterinary. He maintains an interest in conservation research and volunteers his data science skills to the project by writing Python scripts to manage the volume of collected data.
Nature Up North project manager Kayla Edmunds ’21 is responsible for day-to-day operations such as monitoring the North Country Wild project.
Engaging both students and the community is so exciting and makes the work so powerful.”
–Erika Barthelmess, Piskor Professor of Biology and Nature Up North Project Director
Corinna Pilcher ’21 completed her Senior-Year Experience under the supervision of Lisa Torrey, associate professor of math, computer science, and statistics, to develop a first-generation machine learning project that helped identify if there are animals in the game camera images.
Laura Bolduc ’24, Torrey’s fall semester computer science intern, worked on an experiment comparing the automated assessment with the North Country Wild project results to check accuracy.
“The hope of fostering better environmental literacy and environmental concern,” says Barthelmess, is channeled through in-person experiential learning done by students and alumni and through outreach and partnerships with other organizations and residents through citizen science.
“Citizen science projects engage the community in collecting local data,” explains Barthelmess, whose research focuses on wildlife habitat requirements in the North Country and, more specifically, the A2A Corridor. “A2A is an initiative to protect habitat between the Adirondack Park in the United States and Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, because that is a known corridor for wildlife movement,” explains Barthelmess. “We are trying to protect the habitat between the two parks, but you have to know which habitat the wildlife requires.”
Residents along the corridor can be integral to collecting and identifying evidence of migration patterns and population densities.
In October 2022, Nature Up North added another tool called Zooniverse to assist in the North Country Wild project’s research efforts. The Zooniverse boasts being one of the world’s largest and most popular platform for people-powered research. It provides a platform for citizen science projects that allows anyone with an internet connection to help with data analysis.
“We built out the North Country Wild project on Zooniverse for our in-house use as a way to go through all the images and get a sense of what the pictures were,” Barthelmess explains. “In October, we opened it to the public as an official project. Anybody with an internet connection can find and contribute to our project by helping to identify animals in our images on the Zooniverse.”
Barthelmess says they went from having 100 volunteers on the project to more than 1,000 volunteers worldwide.
“The advantage of this approach is that all these thousands of people are learning something about wildlife because they’re looking at the pictures,” says Barthelmess. “We were excited when this launched because it also means we have a whole new mechanism that’s easy to share with school teachers around the county who want to engage their students in real ecology work.”
Barthelmess says the official launch of the North Country Wild project with broad engagement is a fitting birthday present for the Nature Up North project, which celebrates its 10th anniversary at St. Lawrence in 2023.
Nature Up North is funded through generous support from both Laurentians and foundations. For more information on how to support the program, contact Carol Smith, Senior Officer, Corporations and Foundations Grants Office & UWC Campus Liaison, at 315-229-5574 or csmith@stlawu.edu.
