POOWONG Consolidated School is celebrating success after receiving a 2025 Victorian Junior Landcare and Biodiversity Grant worth $3329.80 to support its new Discovery Zone project.
The school is one of just 111 schools and youth organisations across Victoria to receive funding through Landcare Australia’s Junior Landcare program, which is supported by the Victorian Government.
The grants encourage young people to take part in hands-on biodiversity projects that deliver both environmental and educational outcomes.
At Poowong, the grant has made it possible to establish a student-led Citizen Science program on the school grounds, part of an ongoing effort to better understand and improve local biodiversity. Over the past three years, students have been learning about native animals, plants and ecosystems, and this new project allows them to monitor and record changes over time.
With support from Lisa Wangman of the Bass Coast Landcare Network, students took part in two incursions to learn how to identify and photograph species and upload their findings to iNaturalist. The grant also allowed the school to purchase class sets of sweep nets, binoculars, macroinvertebrate water-testing kits and a digital microscope, making citizen science accessible to every student.
Through the program, students are now taking part in national initiatives such as the Aussie Bird Count, River Detectives Water Testing and Pollinator Count, while using their findings to enhance the school’s habitat, planting pollinator gardens, building lizard and insect shelters, and installing bird boxes.
The long-term goal is to give students the skills and confidence to become active environmental stewards in their community.
“The creation of an on-ground, ongoing, student-led program will assist in us being able to highlight what is and isn’t working for the native animals, plants and other living things in our school grounds,” Science and sustainability teacher, Lauren Dobie, explained, highlighting the ongoing benefit of the project.
“Students enjoyed learning these skills in isolation at different times over the past year, and we looked forward to their engagement as we combined all of these skills into a project that gave back to the students themselves, biodiversity records, and in turn the environment at PCS and the wider community.”
