Bad news bears, Denverites. We have a new invasive in town. The New Zealand Mudsnail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum) has been spotted in a few places along the South Platte River now. It hasn't spread everywhere yet, so learn more below about this harmful critter and what you can do to make sure we don't let it spread any further.
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We recently hosted our 2020 fall family stewardship day at Centennial Gardens, and saying we were inspired by our participating families is an understatement! They were so eager to clean up their city, that we could have kept going for hours! We started our morning by picking up trash throughout Centennial Gardens, and slowly made our way outside of the Gardens along the South Platte River. It took extra sharp eyes to spot a lot of the litter along the river, as it was mostly small pieces of trash. Although it didn’t feel like we were filling our garbage bags as quickly, we were still making a HUGE impact on our River! Smaller pieces of trash can be even more harmful to our aquatic ecosystems because they are harder to see and retrieve once in the water, and aquatic animals can mistake them for food. But don't worry! Good thing we had smaller eyes with us to spot that smaller trash! Our SPREE families spread out and conquered the Trash Monster one piece at a time! ![]() We ended up finishing our day with three FULL garbage bags of litter that would have eventually made its way into our South Platte River and on. To reward our SPREE families for their great work, they each left with a bag of outdoor and at-home crafts/activities, plus some extra SPREE goodies :) We want to thank everyone who attended and helped us work toward a cleaner city, and thus a happier river! The Youth Exploring Stewardship (YES) Coalition is a group of more than 15 organizations who are located in or working along Colorado’s Front Range and who engage youth in environmental stewardship. While such a network has long existed for stewardship organizations statewide, youth organizations have been largely compartmentalized or participating in small-scale collaboration. The YES Coalition was initiated in the spring of 2017 by Wildlands Restoration Volunteers to bridge that gap with the intent of establishing best practices, determining opportunities for partnership, and maximizing our impact through collaboration. The third annual YES Conference was slated for this October. Of course, due to the realities of the current pandemic, organization partners and our youth board had to get creative when planning this year's conference. What they created was a seamless blend of small, in-person, outside activities, and virtual workshops.
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