Biodiversity Centre

With the dominance of television, video games, the internet in the lives of many children, they have become less connected to the natural world around them than previous generations.

The Nature Programme is designed to encourage children to investigate, discover and explore their natural surroundings and start to build a relationship with it. Students receive a guided tour through the gully where they are introduced to examples of how plants play significant roles in their lives, followed by nature based learning exercises. With small groups of students, the programme concentrates on more practical learning activities.

The Nature Programme was officially launched in the summer of 2008 with the support of German businessman, Mr. Dieter Mennekes. Mr. Mennekes donated the funds to construct both a gazebo, which is now used as an open air class room, as well as a nursery which aids the re-introduction of native plants to the gully.

1. Energy of Life

This is an interactive, role-playing game, using the plants and animals of Barbados.

This game helps students become more familiar with the names, biology and natural history of the plants and animals. Details of plants and animals are provided because children are intrigued by specific facts. But most importantly, by simulating what is found in a food web, students will learn the ways in which the plants and animals are associated with one another in diverse and interdependent relationships.

2. Meet a tree

The children participate in three activities that introduce them to trees.  There are no right or wrong answers. These activities allow the children to ask questions, observe and logically come up with the answers. It is also a lot of fun.

3.Nature Journaling

Students draw and record what they are seeing in nature. The purpose is to study where you live and how you relate to it. Nature journaling is the regular recording of observations, perceptions, and feelings about the natural world around you.  It is your path into the exploration of the natural world around you and into your personal connection with it. Scientists draw on what they see and then record it. This activity is great for observation, to be quiet, to be still, and connect to what you are recording.

4. Forest Floor

Examining the layers of leaf litter reveals much about the process and stages of decomposition occurring on the forest floor. This is nature’s composting. Also the cycle of life when a large tree falls and how new life begins in a forest.

5. Animals of the forest

The green monkey and reptiles are investigated. Barbados and the Caribbean were once considered the hot spot in the world for reptiles, however, little is known about them now.

6. Cool plants

Collecting and making herbarium specimens. The students will learn about the different plants they collect from medicinal to natives and exotics.

By hoping to persuade corporate Barbados to adopt a primary school for one year, the activities offered with the Nature Programme will be expanded.

Companies may choose to adopt their own school. It is proposed that students will visit the gully 6 times during the school year, 2 visits per term. The facilitator will go to the school one week before the students are expected to visit the gully in order to introduce them to the planned activities. Since the sessions will be hands-on, discovery learning activities, each group will comprise no more than 15 students.

There are roughly 650 species of flowering plants found wild in Barbados, only two are endemics.However, Barbados is part of the Lesser Antilles which has approximately 3000 native species which accounts for only 13% of the total flora of the archipelago.
Click Here For Plant List

There are less than 200 flowering plants found in Welchman Hall Gully with only a third being native, the rest are introduced exotics. The overall aim of the projects is to:

• Reintroduce native plants back into their original habitat
• To preserve native plants
• Develop in situ conservation of gully plants
• Create a niche for scientific research
• Educate
• Contribute to the preservation and conservation of gullies and gene pools of plants, highlighting the need of terrestrial protected areas
• Start a stock of native plants that can be used by gardeners/landscapers to increase natives used in landscaping, thereby increasing the value and importance of native plants.
  

Click Here For Plant List

In September 2008, four students from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, as part of a course for three months, they have built the nursery and have started plant hunting. They will be collecting, propagating and cataloguing the native plants they collect.

Research Students

Since March 2007, the gully has had many request from both students and Professors from the University of West Indies Cave Hill Campus to conduct research on plants in the gully. Presently, Anton Norville, a gradate student at the University of West Indies is conducting a study on the biology of population of the giant African snails that posses distorted shells.

School Camp and Tours

The gully is popular for school and camps to visit. We provide guided and unguided tours, although more that 90% of the tours are guided. The tours last about 1 hour and are ended with questions and prizes for the students. So far, in 2008 we have had over 1400 students go through the gully.