This year’s Touch An Animal Day moving to Odell Weeks in Aiken
This year’s Touch An Animal Day event will feature edible plants, and attendees will have the chance to ask graduate students, conducting research at SREL, questions.
SREL Outreach educator leads after-school program to national win
“The students decided to address what they could to improve the well-being of pollinators,” Hurst said. “They hypothesized that natural pesticides would act as a pest repellent allowing the pollinators time to work.”
A plan to protect pollinators (The Front Page)
Michel’le Jackson
Aiken Standard
July 19, 2019
Chernobyl Wildlife Thriving As Scientists Find Exclusion Zone Full of Animals
“We’ve seen evidence of a diversity of wildlife in the CEZ through our previous research, but this is the first time that we’ve seen white-tailed eagles, American mink and river otter on our cameras.”
Aiken residents, visitors flock to Cold Creek Nurseries for Wild Bird Expo
Chris Leaphart, a University of Georgia doctoral student at the SREL, was in charge of an exhibit that featured three female mallard ducks that are members of a breeding colony he is using in his research.
Love of wildlife leads to award for SREL’s Sean Poppy
Poppy, who has worked at the Savannah River Ecology Lab for 20 years, gives more than 300 presentations a year to more than 40,000 people, most of whom are children
REMOP to begin sampling in Burke County
True Citizen
2018-10-10 / News
The University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory’s (SREL) Radionuclide Education, Monitoring and Outreach Project, known as REMOP, is starting the sampling phase of the project in Burke County.
Megan Winzeler, the program’s coordinator, said the project is seeking individuals to donate meat that was farm raised or harvested from animals in the county. They also need vegetables that were grown in the county.
She said the group will collect a limited number of samples to educate residents about monitoring programs in the area.
“Monitoring programs involve large-scale sampling efforts on an annual basis to continually estimate the health of the environmental pathways contaminants can move. This means thousands of samples for each media being tested and many hundreds of man-hours to collect, process and analyze the data,” Winzeler said. “Our effort is on a smaller scale and cannot be used to inform or come to conclusions about public health. Our focus is to help people understand the process and use the data from their community to help them understand the larger picture.”
Winzeler said residents will learn how data is collected, processed and analyzed by entities like the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site.
Matthew Hamilton, a research professional at SREL, who will conduct the sampling, said the samples collected for REMOP will be sent to an external lab for testing.
The results from the testing will be presented in fact sheets for residents. The team said the fact sheets will be void of technical jargon and written for the general public to understand.
Winzeler said REMOP will initially use meats and vegetables for the sampling phase because “they are a pathway to exposure.”
She said that water, food, soil and air, often referred to as media in technical documents, are also pathways for a contaminant to enter the human body. Other pathways will be sampled at a later time.
Individuals who are interested in learning more about the requirements for donating samples and more about the project should attend a REMOP talk in Burke County, visit the project’s booth at the upcoming county fair or contact Natalie Herrington, the REMOP event coordinator, at 706.533.3363.
The next talk, Environmental Monitoring Programs, will be held on Monday, Oct. 15, at 6 p.m. at the Burke County Library in Waynesboro.
The group will collect collard greens and turnips in November.
No personal identification will be used in association with the samples that are collected.
SREL partners with coalition to bring STEM education to Allendale
Augusta Chronicle
SREL will partner with a new collaborative known as the STEM Community Coalition to take STEM education to students in Allendale, a community that historically is underserved in this area. The team includes the Allendale School District, the South Carolina Promise Zone and the Savannah River Site Community Reuse Organization, known as SRSCRO.
SREL is proud to partner with the coalition, one of only eight organizations in the country recently selected out of 92 applicants, to share in the grant, known as the US2020 STEM Coalition Challenge. The grant will allow the collaborative to provide STEM education to students in rural and low-income communities through experiential learning experiences and one-on-one, hands-on mentoring.
Mindy Mets, the Nuclear Workforce Initiatives program manager at SRSCRO, said the goal is to connect existing industry and outreach programs with students in Allendale schools. “SREL helped in winning this grant for Allendale by offering to provide its existing education outreach programs for Allendale students,” Mets said.
P.J. Perea, SREL’s outreach and public relations manager, said SREL is excited to serve as a partner and adviser on the program and teach the wonders of STEM to the students of Allendale.
Snakes, pollinators top attractions at Touch an Animal Day
Bill Bengston, bbengston@aikenstandard.com
Aiken Standard
August 25, 2018
Saturday morning brought a friendly flood of traffic to Savannah River Ecology Laboratory’s conference center, drawing 713 visitors for the facility’s annual Touch an Animal Day.
The event, in keeping with tradition, offered the chance for hands-on contact with such creatures as salamanders, snakes (mostly non-venomous, with the exception of an immobilized rattlesnake) and birds, along with a variety of pelts, shells and skulls. Kid-friendly guidance from dozens of educators and researchers was also part of the package.
Veterans on hand for the event included herpetologist Whit Gibbons, who offered an adult pine snake – relatively rare – for visitors to handle and hold.
“One thing I was very pleased about this year is, nearly everybody came through,” he said. “All the kids wanted to touch the snakes. A lot of them wanted to hold the snakes. Nobody seemed afraid – very few people – and I got lots of comments about … this rare snake, and people were concerned that they’re getting rare because of habitat destruction and how we’re treating the world.”
That treatment is “not good,” said Gibbons, while acknowledging he welcomed people’s expressions of concern.
Among the first-time presenters was Katie Kule, now in her first year as SREL’s pollinator educator.
“I was surprised when I asked the kids if they knew what night pollinators were, or night butterflies, and they said, ‘Oh, yeah – moths!’ That was really exciting, and they knew that right off the bat,” she said.
“There was only one group of kids I asked that didn’t know that … so someone’s teaching them in school,” she said.
Kule’s territory is Aiken County’s schools, with a focus on making gardens, leading nature walks and otherwise spreading the word, with plenty of time to be spent in classrooms in the months ahead.
Ecology lab hosts 10th Annual ‘Touch An Animal Day’
Augusta Chronicle
Posted Aug 22, 2018 at 2:01 a.m.
The University of Georgia Savannah River Ecology Laboratory will host its 10th Annual “Touch An Animal Day” on Saturday, Aug. 25 from 9 a.m. to noon.
Attendees of this free event will have the opportunity to meet members of the SREL staff, including the outreach team and graduate students who will share scientific poster presentations. The poster presentations will cover various topics from the effect of contaminants in snakes and ducks to diseases that can be found in amphibians.
“The University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory is delighted to bring this family-friendly event to the public for the 10th time. Held for the first time in August of 2009, the day of fun continues to give children and adults of all ages, the opportunity to see and touch plants and animals from the local area. This year’s event will feature returning favorites—snakes, an opossum and edible plants at the healthy beverage station. A pollinator exhibit will make its debut,” according to a press release.
The event takes place at the UGA SREL Conference Center on Highway 278, approximately 17 miles southeast of Aiken. Please note that GPS has been known to give inaccurate directions. The conference center is not located on the Savannah River Site.