Gulf Guardian Award Winners 2005
Youth/Education Category - 3rd Place
The Gulf of Mexico Program recently announced that the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve will receive a third place Gulf Guardian Award for 2005 in the Youth/Education Category for the “Baldwin County Grasses in Classes Program”.
The Baldwin County Grasses in Classes program was established in January 2005 to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of coastal habitat nurseries by Baldwin County school students. The purpose is to help restore Baldwin County’s coastal habitats by providing an educational resource for applying student learning to real world ecological and agricultural practices. The participants in this project include approximately 450 high school students from the aquaculture, environmental science and marine biology classes at Baldwin County High, Fairhope High and Gulf Shores High Schools. These nurseries provide an inexpensive source of native plants to be used in federal, state, county and city habitat restoration projects in the area. By raising the plants in their own nurseries, the students will gain a meaningful hands-on learning experience, and the cost of coastal habitat planting projects to government agencies will be lowered significantly.