In the fall and winter of 2024, middle school students from Spring Street International scoured Jackson Beach, looking for organisms and debris stranded on the beach. This class assignment wasn’t just about a fun day at the beach, though. The participating students are part of a global science effort, called the Beach Surveyor Project, and the data that they gathered at their local beach is helping to answer important scientific questions.

The Beach Surveyor Project seeks to understand the ecology of sandy beaches, by working with students to identify and document the animals, plants and objects found on their local beaches. The project was started by the Smithsonian Institution’s Marine Global Earth Observatory team, with funding from the Smithsonian’s Life on a Sustainable Planet Community Science grant opportunity. The goal of the project was to co-develop working guides with teachers from across the Americas that could be used in classrooms globally to guide students as they surveyed their local beach. The co-development and evaluation of the draft working guides engaged 10 STEM teachers from different countries across the Americas, including the United States, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay and Chile.

Submitted by Spring Street International School.

To kick off the project, six of the teachers traveled to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland in July for a workshop. During the workshop, the teachers and SERC scientists co-developed working guides for the project that would satisfy both the needs of the teachers and the scientists. When the teachers returned to their countries, all 10 teachers completed the beach surveying activities with their students. They carefully examined the most common organisms and objects stranded on their local beach, like seaweeds, shells and wood. In an effort to become good environmental stewards, they also collected manmade litter, which they classified and removed from the beach. In order to understand whether objects and litter come from distant or local sources, the students did buoyancy testing: things that do not float come from nearby, whereas floating objects have arrived from distant sources via the marine currents. Following the beach visit and the evaluation of their beach findings, the students shared this information with the scientists.

“The beach surveyor project has been an exciting way to connect my classroom to science in action,” said Holly Durham-Guckian, project leader teacher at the school. “Our students are learning how scientists and citizens can work together to understand more about ecosystems. Our class has been looking at our beaches with a new lens, considering that the driftwood is an artifact of the historical timber industry and may not always be here. The worldwide connections between teachers, students, and ecosystems is an exciting opportunity I look forward to building upon.”

After having completed all activities in the field and classroom, seven of the teachers traveled again to Maryland in December to work with Smithsonian scientists to evaluate and improve the materials. All working guides and complementary materials were prepared in English and Spanish following the highest educational and scientific standards.

At the final workshop in December, Durham-Guckian shared her experiences with the other teachers. She noted that they could already see important differences from the other sandy beaches on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. “My students enjoyed meeting the Smithsonian scientists, exchanging artwork with students from Chile and Mexico and generated many questions for further research about our local beaches,” said Durham-Guckian.

“Having local data from different beaches is valuable for monitoring beach ecosystems over a large geographic scale to support coastal conservation,” said Martin Thiel, managing director of MarineGEO. “Beaches accumulate objects and organisms from adjacent marine habitats – looking carefully at these signs washed up on the beach can open … a window to the sea in front of us. This initiative is hopefully the beginning of a wider effort where we can regularly involve beach visitors from around the country and the world.”

This year, the team hopes to expand the project to even more beaches and classrooms worldwide. They plan to share the final working guides with interested teachers from around the world in late 2025 at the MarineGEO website.

For other participatory science projects of MarineGEO, you can visit the Ocean Travelers Project Instagram.