A group of 12 students from Monache High School’s ESA (Environmental Science Academy) Pathway recently participated in the 2016 Sequoia Forestry Challenge. The event, which took place October 12-15 at the YMCA Camp Sequoia Lake east of Fresno, featured 57 students from seven schools. Teams from Monache took third and fourth place out of a total of 13 teams.
Students were given a task of making an inventory of live trees around the camp’s buildings and infrastructure and collecting data on trees not already marked for removal and classifying them by species and size. They evaluated the health of the trees to predict the need for future removal. During the event, students completed field training, followed by a field test to assess their technical forestry knowledge and data collecting skills.