Students win prizes for March Monitoring Month and Koura Kraze.

Over $5000 worth of prizes were recently awarded to schools that took part in March Monitoring Month, an annual competition run by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s environmental education programme EMAP.

The competition encourages students to monitor and report back on the health of their local freshwater environment and is sponsored by SCITECH New Zealand and BOC ‘Where’s there Water’ Environmental grants scheme.

Koura Kraze encourages students from schools all over the country to search for koura, freshwater crayfish, in their local waterways and submit their findings to an online database. The purpose of the activity is to collate a national database for koura distribution as an indicator of waterway health.

Schools that participated in March Monitoring Month this year produced a variety of projects including cartoon strips, posters, photographs, blogs and stories about their water monitoring activities. This year over forty schools took part from Dargaville to Invercargill. The best project was awarded a prize prize of a digital microscope valued at $400. Other prizes given out included a remote controlled dragonfly and koura artwork.

Major prize winning schools were:

Levin East School, Manawatu, Room 19
Opoutere School, Whangamata, Room 4
Katikati College, Bay of Plenty, 9MKE
Baverstock Oak School, Manukau City

For more information and photographs contact Rebecca Goffin, EMAP National Coordinator email: Rebecca.goffin@rsnz.org or visit www.emap.rsnz.org