INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Five teams from Gifford Middle School travelled to the Savannas Preserve State Park last Friday, to compete in the 2013-2014 Indian River Lagoon Envirothon Regional Competition. Gifford Middle School swept the middle school division and made quite an impression on the judges.
The school’s Team Echo earned third place and top honors in the Aquatics Ecology and the Current Issue categories. Team Wildcats earned second place and top honors in the categories of Wildlife and the Indian River Lagoon. And first place went to Team Widgeon Pigeons, who also took home top honors in the categories of Forestry and Soils and Land use.
All three of the top scoring Gifford Middle School teams earned category scores that surpassed many of the teams in the high school division.
The first-place winning Gifford Middle School Widgeon Pigeons included Ryan Baudo, Cody Lanier, Michael Villafuerte, Ryan Goldfarb and Alexandra Katz.
Envirothon is an outdoor competition designed to encourage student interest in natural resource conservation and environmental management. It is a field-oriented program in which students, working in teams of five, learn to use critical thinking and communications skills, work as a team and develop their problem-solving abilities to answer written and oral questions and conduct hands-on investigations in five study areas: aquatic ecology, forestry, soils and land use, wildlife, and a current environmental issue. The Indian River Lagoon competition adds one additional subject area: ecology of the Indian River Lagoon, one of the most bio diverse estuaries in the continental United States.
The Envirothon concept was created by the Pennsylvania Association of Conservation Districts in 1979 as the “Environmental Olympics.”
This unique hands-on, outdoor environmental program quickly gained popularity among school districts and eventually spread to other states.
Envirothons are structured around regional and statewide competitions. The Indian River Lagoon Envirothon is held each year in March and includes both middle and high school teams. The winning high school teams from each of the counties participating in the Indian River Lagoon Envirothon (Brevard, Indian River, St. Lucie, Martin and Okeechobee) may then compete in the statewide Florida Envirothon, held in April.
Winning teams from state competitions then go on to compete in the annual Canon Envirothon, held in July.
For more information about Envirothon, visit www.envirothon.org.
