New Season for East RFRP

Students learning about species and relevant identification skills
(Species in picture: Adenanthera pavonina)

Students learning about species and relevant identification skills

With the coming of the new season as too are new challenges and experiences. New students have for the second time this year joined the service marking the start of season 3. Taking new students to explore the campus flora and fauna is our first key step into their integration, and a key exciting event for the newcomers. However challenges await, a lack of plant resource availability has forced us to explore new avenues in our nursery; while new students must be taught essential skills. They have begun learning about the different species on campus, distinguishing them through observing features such as leaf shape, height and colour. 

While some of the students tried to finish our plant inventory management project, a crucial but painstaking process, others watered and maintained the plants. Nonetheless, with these newcomers comes opportunities for growth, both in the nursery and at heart as a new generation of conservationists is born.

Sheet used for identification (leaf shapes)

Students actively communicating

It has been a while ...

This poor old blog has been neglected for a while — a long while. Let's try to put some life back into it.

URRP founder Nathan Hunt moved on to greener (well, colder) pastures in June. Much missed, but the good news is that we have a strong staff team in the shape of three High School Biology teachers, Amy Woolloff, Barry Daniels and Judson Tomlin, as well as Simon Bignell (Geography and Environmental Systems & Society teacher) and veteran amateur Frankie Meehan. Barry leads the GC; Amy, Judson (and occasionally Barry) co-lead the HS service group; and Simon and Frankie co-lead the Middle School group.

So what have we been up to? Quite an assortment of things, as is always the case with tree husbandry:

• reorganising the Shade House (thank you, Callista, for the new tables layout); watering, weeding and discarding saplings;
• checking our marcotted shoots (zero success!) and our cuttings that we had kept for months in transparent plastic "tents" (a success rate of about 60%);
• mulching many dozens of trees that URRP students had planted out in the past year, especially in May/June 2019;
• replacing a Syzygium cuminii behind the Art block that had been ravaged by a fungal infection;
• helping UWCSEA Foundation donor Cathia Magnenat and her sons Quentin and Lohan plant a Cynometra cauliflora (on 23 Jan.) near the swings behind the Art block;
• helping another donor, Jennifer Zhang, and her children Tony (Class of 2019), Maggie and Ivy, plant three beautiful Cratoxylum cauliflora trees (on 24 Jan.) by the rainwater catchment stream on level 3 of the Middle School block