BFA seniors Max Clark, Reagan Eastman, and Kyle St. Pierre returned from the world's largest Geoscience conference, the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco, CA on Friday, December 15, 2023. They, along with high school science teachers Thomas Lane and Laura Heil, joined 27,000 other scientists to communicate research findings in the Geosciences during the week of Dec. 11-15th.
(Left to right, Kyle St. Pierre, Reagan Eastman, Max Clark, Ms. Laura Heil and Mr. Tom Lane outside the exhibition hall at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.)
In June 2023, students Max, Reagan, Kyle and Wyatt French completed a partial transect of Franklin County from east to west.
(BFA Transect Team, front to back, Kyle St. Pierre, Max Clark and Reagan Eastman wade across Mill River, 2023)
The ongoing project was conceived by Mr. Lane in 2018. At that time during the high schools Minimester about a dozen students, Mr. Lane, and Mr. Pfeiffer (HS science teacher) walked a compass line from the easternmost edge of Franklin County to Lake Champlain at Georgia Beach park. A distance of about 35 kilometers; the intention was to collect data on ecological and environmental factors in order to establish a baseline from which to compare change. Data was collected on such parameters as; human presence, animal presence, temperature, soil moisture, number of birds, tree types, and others. The following year in 2019, senior Michael Roy (also on the 2018 Transect Team) compiled the data.
During the follow-up transect completed last June the same data was collected then compared to the 2018 data.
The students' findings were communicated via scientific poster presentation at AGU as part of the Bright STaRs Program.
(BFA students left to right, Reagan Eastman, Max Clark and Kyle St. Pierre, discuss their findings with Julie Major, a researcher from Quebec City. AGU 2023)
The Bright STaRs program “provides a dedicated forum for around 100 students to present their own research results to the scientific community and learn about exciting research, education, and career opportunities in Earth and space science.“
Funding for travel was provided by the Fairfax Board of Trustees and the Parent Teacher Association.