Questions to guide your initial fact-finding and choice of a focus:

In your community:

• What environmental restoration efforts are underway, and how is progress being tracked? How are volunteers involved?
• Are there sites in need of restoration that are not yet being addressed?
• What is the health of your local streams? Is anyone monitoring them?
  

At your school:

• Is there a community member who can speak at your school on environmental restoration efforts in your area?
• What can you do to make your school landscape more sustainable?
• Are there native plants growing within your school grounds? Can you take on a plot of the school grounds to plant in a way that will benefit your area’s birds and insects?

Monitoring is a vital step in carrying out environmental restoration projects, to find out how the project is going and whether anything needs extra attention, or needs to be changed.

A monitoring process:

• Measures changes over time. Typically, a restoration project involves several years of monitoring. It takes time for native plants to become established, or for a change to affect a full ecosystem.
• Repeats its measurement in the same way each time, to be able to compare the results. A person measuring a percentage of weed cover over time checks the same plot or plots, at the same time(s) of year, and uses the same definition of which plants are weeds.
• Documents conditions at a site. Monitoring focuses on a condition that will indicate progress of the whole. For introducing native plants, a focus of monitoring might be the survival rate of new plants, or the percentage of weed cover. The results are recorded, so that they can be referred to later.
• First tests for baseline conditions. One preliminary step is to find out the conditions of a site in advance, to be able to determine and document any change. A procedure is planned before the project takes place.