Help nature, get exercise, learn in local creeks and nature

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While we shelter in place to avoid spreading COVID-19, it's important for mental and physical health of all ages to get outdoors, get exercise, and enjoy nature. Help the environment, feel connected to nature and others, learn, and get healthy exercise as a volunteer with 25-year-old Friends of Five Creeks, at sites from North Berkeley to Richmond.

Please email f5creeks@gmail.com for information. Tell us something about yourself and what you are looking for. Are you free weekdays or weekends? About how many hours per week or month? Are you looking for something for a group? What area do you live in, and how would you expect to reach sites (e.g. car, bicycle, bus). We might know of opportunities with others closer to you.

F5C has several kinds of opportunities in urban nature, along creeks and shorelines and in parks:

1. Individuals or families can "adopt" a small site or project to maintain and beautify, working with guidance but independently, on their own time. This could be as little as a monthly walk to check for specific harmful invasives.
2. A few people can join our "weekday weed warriors," a small group working at varied sites on Tuesday mornings, with no obligation and no RSVP.
3. We have part-time, short-term paid internships for beginning environmental professionals: students close to graduation or recent graduates seeking environmental careers.
4. A small number of high-school juniors or seniors working part-time and short term as interns. These interns should have a demonstrated interest in the environment, be able to work semi-independently, be able to reach our sites on their own (without parents, by foot, bicycle, or transit). They should be significantly helped by the experience, e.g. through income and/or help with college admission or a future job.
5. We are cautiously resuming work parties for fairly small groups, as well as for the general public with signup in advance. Check our web site for what may be scheduled, or email to ask.

Anyone can help clean the environment, in your neighborhood or in beautiful natural areas, on your own, with your family, or with friends. The coronavirus crisis has greatly decreased litter -- when this is over, let's keep it this way! You need gloves, bags, a grabber (available at hardware stores), and common sense -- don't pick up anything sharp or disgusting. (The California Coastal Commission's guidelines are at https://www.coastal.ca.gov/publiced/ccd/Guidance.pdf.)

Many very young children love picking up trash. Older ones, and adults, can have contests, like who can find the weirdest thing (post on social media?) You also can record your results with the Ocean Conservancy's free Clean Swell app, contributing to knowledge worldwide.

Myriad citizen-science projects let you enjoy the outdoors, learn about nature, contribute to knowledge, and help the environment. The free iNaturalist app, from San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences, lets you photograph and report wild plants and animals, and helps you identify them, so you learn while you contribute to knowledge. A kid-friendly companion app, Seek, makes this great for families. Projects that use iNaturalist to contribute to much-needed environmental knowledge include Redwood Watch and the California Pollination Project. Other projects with valuable environmental goals include the Western Monarch Milkweed Mapper, CalDNA (soil samples), the Cattail Monitoring Project (with the US Geological Survey) Green Watch (reporting state of outdoor places and transit), and Sky at Night (measuring light in the night sky, with the National Optical Astronomy Observatory). A good way to find the project that suits you is SciStarter.org. There are thousands: Set it to look for projects in your area, choose a topic from the menu, and look for projects with stable sponsors and clear scientific or environmental goals.