Over the past month and a half three students from Gladstone High School have been hard at work transforming litter which was pulled out of a nearby stream into beautiful art work.

The SOLVE office recently moved from Hillsboro to Portland and we were in need of new artwork to grace our walls.  What better way to show off SOLVE’s mission than to re-purpose litter into artwork!  So we were off to clean up litter from Phillips Creek.  This stream flows beside the Clackamas Town Center and is surrounded by a sea of parking lots.  Litter that is dropped nearby or blown out of overflowing trash cans washes into Phillips Creek during rain events can can be a real problem for wildlife that call Phillips Creek home.

From the Surfrider Foundation:

Rain or overwatering flushes plastic litter through a storm drain system or directly to creeks, streams and rivers that lead to the ocean.  After plastics enter the marine environment they slowly photodegrade into smaller pieces that marine life can mistake for food, sometimes with fatal results.

We handed over five full bags of litter from the creek to art teacher, Brenden Thwing at Gladstone High.  Student then came up with the concept completely on their own, SOLVE’s founder former Governor Tom McCall. Perfect!  The students did a fantastic job with creative representation in closing our garbage loop.

Thank you Gladstone High School!!

Glencoe High School Green Team has removed about 3,000 pounds of Armenian Blackberry and planted 700 native trees and shrubs just this school year. The transformation of our site behind Glencoe High School has been one of astronomical measures. People walking the track from the community, students of Glencoe High School, and surely all of the wildlife a the site have taken an interest in the incredible work that has been accomplished.

Students made an effort to ensure our new plantings would survive by placing reused coffee bags made out of a natural grass called jute next to each tree or shrub. This will give our plants the head start they need to grow taller than any invasive species that may try to move in. Next, we poured buckets of mulch in a circle around our plants to help them retain moisture more effectively. Even though its hard to imagine dry, sunny days in the middle of this rainy week, they will come eventually. When they do, the mulch will keep the plant well hydrated.

We decided to take our Green Team activities inside for the end of the class period to do some reflecting on all of the work we have done. Students wrote about significant experiences they’ve had in nature through stories and poetry. Students have the opportunity to submit their work to an annual anthology entitled Honoring Our Rivers (http://www.honoringourriver.org/).

During this event which includes free breakfast and lunch, you will have the opportunity to meet women from a wide spectrum of scientific fields and have a chat about pursuing a career in science. We will be having a continental breakfast meet and greet at Pacific University before heading out to Gale’s Creek in Forest Grove, one of SOLVE‘s restoration sites, to plant some trees and shrubs together.

Read on for the specifics:

Who: Girls ages 12 and up

When: Saturday March 10, 9:00 am -1:00 pm

Where & What to Expect:

• 9:00 am: Breakfast and Activity with Mentors
  • Location: Pacific University, Forest Grove (Milky Way Room of the Creamery Building)
  • Girls will see a brief presentation on careers in science and then have a chance to talk with mentors in a smaller group setting about their careers and how they got there. Breakfast will be donated by Pacific University.
• 11:00 am: Tree Planting
  • Location: Gales Creek, Forest Grove
  • After our morning activities, we will take a chartered bus to Gales Creek, one of our active restoration sites, to plant native trees and shrubs. Lunch will be provided at the end of the day, the bus will be back at Pacific University by 1pm.

What to bring: Please wear appropriate clothing and shoes to be outside planting trees. SOLVE will provide tools and food.

We look forward to another exciting Women In Science Day!

Go here to register. We only have room for 35 girls, so register soon! Contact Charlie Vogelheim at SOLVE for further information: (503) 844-9571 x329, charlie@solv.org

Stewards of Council Creek under the roles of Roots & Shoots members and young conservationists extraodinaires, reunited together after a restful couple of winter months. Upon reuniting, students continued to maintain our plants by securing coffee bags on the earth next to them. When a few students new to Green Team came to join us, other Green Team students explained our restoration efforts articulately and thoroughly.

Students then wrote a few reflections on their work at Council Creek. Students thought about the sorts of things in nature they refuse to see our society destroy, their favorite times near rivers, and more.

To wrap things up, we did a quick litter clean-up of the site to try to bypass the trashes and plastics at Council Creek from going any further downstream.  Students continued working passionately throughout the entire activity to help save their watershed. We are looking forward to future endeavors in macroinvertebrate sampling and much more!

This week, some of our newest Green Teams, the Sabin Schellenberg Technical Center’s Forestry Classes came out to our Rock Creek confluence site. SOLVE has been working at this site for nearly five years, and while it is one of the shadier, more forested sites we work on in the Portland metro area, it also is one of the biggest sites infected with invasive species. Huge blankets of english ivy cover some of the forest floor and trees, butterfly bushes and Japanese knotweed are found in the stream bed, and just upland from the stream are several acres of high and dense blackberry brambles. While we have made some major advances on the ivy and knotweed, the blackberry brambles are so expansive that it seemed the only reasonable thing to do about these blackberries with the resources we had was to spray them (a VERY last resort here at SOLVE). However spraying became unthinkable when a salamander survey discovered the Dunn’s Salamander living at this site. What were we to do? Cue the Sabin Schellenberg Green Teams.

Armed with weed-whackers, chainsaws, and other impressive tools, these students took it upon themselves to begin the hard-core eradication of blackberry from this site. During the two days students worked, they made a major dent in the huge expanse of blackberry growing there. While they were working, they also discovered many treasures hiding under the blackberry including a toilet, an irrigation trailer, and a car. We have been working at this site for several years and in all that time never knew that a car was decomposing away only 50 feet from us; these blackberry brambles were so high that they were able to successfully hide this sedan!

We look forward to working with Sabin Schellenberg at this site in the future. They brought such a wonderful enthusiasm and work ethic with them for this project.

Many very enthusiastic and energetic students from the Clackamas Academy of Industrial Science joined us last week at Goat Island to plant 20 Alnus rubra (Red Alder) trees.  Students learned that Red Alder are a “pioneer” tree species that can grow in soil that lacks nutrients as their roots contain a bacteria that fixes atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.

From the USDA Forest Service:

The ability of red alder to fix atmospheric nitrogen can result in increases in both nitrogen content and its availability in the soil. Nitrogen fixed in the nodules is added to the soil in four ways: direct excretion from living roots or nodules, decomposition of dead roots or nodules, leaching from foliage, and decomposition of litter rich in nitrogen.

Students didn’t stop there!  After recent flooding of the nearby Clackamas River, Goat Island had a lot of litter carried in and students spent some time cleaning up.  Thank you CAIS!!

Written by guest blogger, Chole, Green Team intern from Rachel Carson Environmental Middle School:

On Thursday afternoon, the clomping sound of boots belonging to Green Team members could be heard echoing down the hill from Forest Park Elementary School. After reaching the bottom of the trail the kids were excited to see all the shrubs and trees that were laid out waiting to be planted.

After a brief demonstration from Gina and Chloe (also known as Rachel) everyone rushed off to begin planting Red Alder, Nootka Rose and Red Osier Dogwood.

Forest Park Elementary also developed a new way of removing potting soil from the small plants. As far as the eye could see kids smashed the plants against large trees until their roots were free from all the potting soil. The kids were very fast planters and got through the 70 plants that were set out for them. In the end parents and students planted over 130 trees and shrubs! This group of elementary schoolers is only the second group of kids that age to do restoration with SOLVE, but they work just as hard as any older group. We are all very impressed with their efforts and all the kids can’t wait to get back and do it again!

Students from Mountain View Middle School were welcomed back to ‘Karper Creek’ this afternoon with some rockin’ tunes from a nearby house.  Even though students have been gone for winter break, they were still able to recall all the reasons we are working as a class to restore native trees and shrubs to the creek – To shade the stream, provide a root structure to stabilize eroding banks, and to provide habitat for all the wildlife that calls this creek home.

Students planted 80 native trees and shrubs, removed some HUGE blackberry roots and wrote some awesome reflections about their work that will be submitted to Honoring Our River.

The feelings of water on your feet in the hot summer,

Cooling and cleaning away all your impurities.

Stress free place with on one to tell you you’re wrong or right.

A river is a beauty to see

Where you are wild and absolutely free!

- Nicole, Grade 7, Mountain View Middle School

The River

The calmness of the river

Love of the quiet

The river is so peaceful

- Noah, Grade 7, Mountain View Middle School

Streams are where things are explored

Wonders have been found

Imagination thrives here

-Jeremy, Grade 7, Mountain View Middle School

A river is gorgeous

A river is stress free

A river is gorgeous

For me and you to see, happy

-Nicole, Grade 7 Mountain View Middle School

Streams are mysterious, full of wonder, exciting, adventurous, and most of all give life.

-Jeremy, Grade 7, Mountain View Middle School

It was no ordinary day out at Willow Creek.  To switch things up right from the beginning, we headed over to a different part of the creek new to some of our students. Willow Creek is a fairly large site and we as students of Rachel Carson Environmental Middle School are stewards of the entire area.

Students planted some Nootka Rose, Twin Berry, and Ninebark around the site.  We also tested the water quality and were happy to find the stream to be doing pretty well! On a walk we saw a nice little waterfall and water moving at a good pace.  Our banks are in the process of being stabilized it appears!

Students also learned about marine debris and how 80% of trash in the ocean is land-based from areas just like Willow Creek.  We talked about the ways plastic can harm and kill marine wildlife and how it does not biodegrade, it only photodegrades and breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces.  We talked about the way we try to rise above plastics in our every day lives.  Students use tuperware instead of plastic sandwich bags, have reusable water bottles, bring their own mugs to coffee shops, buy music online instead of CDs, and steer clear of plastic utensils, plates, and cups.

We did a trash clean up of Willow Creek to rid our waterways of plastics and other garbage that could end up in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  We found a ton of really interesting trash: tennis balls, metal stakes, plastic bags, soda bottles, a skull of an animal (which wasn’t really trash at all.. but very interesting!), a Ensatina Salamander (which was a very happy finding!) and even an Oregonian newspaper vending machine!

It was a day of unusual and helpful discoveries for sure!  Willow Creek is sure glad to be a little more trash- free now!

The sun was out and the race was on.  Gladstone High School did just about every type of restoration possible at Rinearson Creek on Monday.

Students began with bioengineering.  We learned that a live cutting of a willow or dogwood branch can be put into the ground to make a whole new tree.  We cut down the branches previously harvested into stakes and installed them in our Reed Canary Grass dominated wetland.

We used the smaller branches we couldn’t use for stakes to make bundles out of.  We tied the bundles up with twine and left them for the next class to install in a trench.

The second class installed more cuttings, adding Douglas Spirea to the mix.  They made more bundles for future endeavors in trenching.  Students dug the trench, wove our bundles together, installed stakes on the small slopes of the trench and then filled it back up.  With a dynamic network of roots, those willow and dogwood will hopefully grow tall to shade Rinearson Creek.

Students also opted to rid the section of Rinearson Creek from the ugly patch of Armenian Blackberry it used to wear.  They did this is record speed.  SOLVE staff looked up and saw the blackberry and literally 10 minutes later it was gone.  Students definitely brought their energy, dedication, and hard work to the creek.

After all of that, we even cleaned up trash along Rinearson Creek.  Students found all sorts of trash that may have ended up downstream or in our ocean.

Thank you, Gladstone High School for your energy and eagerness all throughout our marathon of restoration!