Scientific Contributions: Freshwater Conservation!

by Liliana R. L., Athena’s student

Students in the Fall 2024 session of Contributing to Scientific Understanding are sharing their scientific contributions! Here’s what Liliana has to say…

For the Contributing to Scientific Understanding class, I wanted to do something that followed my personal interests, which led me to create freshwaterinvasives.wordpress.com, a blog where I share information on different invasive species—specifically those invasive to the Midwest, and Chicagoland waterways. As I developed my website, I began to ponder what was important to share about Freshwater Conservation? What gaps in information might there be? What would someone looking at this site be looking for?

This got me thinking if a list of notforprofits in the area might be helpful to add onto my site. Before creating this, however, I wanted to see if there wasn’t already a helpful list of notforprofits focused on this. What I found was a wikipedia article doing just that! However, the formatting made the page hard to read, and there were some non-profits listed that, say, no longer exist; the list was confusing and overwhelming. So, instead of creating my own list, I decided to repair this one. With the help of my fellow students we found even more conservation organizations, and I reformatted the page for readability and user friendliness. The result? This article! (Compare this to the previous version of the article to see how much everyone accomplished!)

Finally, I came to the realization that the website I had created related a lot to what I am working
towards through my Girl Scout Gold Award project. So I decided to count it in! The website is
now not only an informational blog, but the center for a larger, on-going project in which I plan
on making real-life, long lasting change in my city through working with just a few of the
notforprofits on the list I revised.