My school is in Montgomery County, MD.  This is a big, populated, built-up county.  However, our school is located in the agriculture reserve- which is a large area of land that the county has set aside and zoned to be used as agriculture use only.  The ag reserve is a fantastic thing, but it is constantly under threat from developers who want to build on the land that they feel is "wasted".  For my MWEE, I would like my kids to explore the idea of the benefits of the ag reserve.  Is it really providing benefits to the community/county/watershed? What are those benefits? How can we measure them?  What would be the impacts (positive and negative) of developing the land that is currently set aside?

So that is the big picture idea that I want to explore.  To me, it is easy to see what makes this MWEE-able, but  I am less sure about how to connect it to climate change.  I can see how it connects, but will my students be able to make that connection?  Climate change is absolutely going to impact the way we make decisions about land use, but when they are looking at a stream and determining how its health will be impacted by development, will they make that connection?  Should I focus more on the MWEE part or more on the climate change part?  I like the idea of focusing on the ag reserve because it is an important local issue, and in just a short time, my kids are the ones who are going to be making decisions about how the land is used.

In Lewes, I could do field work to determine what tests/data my students will need to know in order to determine if a stream is "impacted".  What specific data do I want them to collect?  What information do they need to make an informed decision?  We currently do a stream study using IWL protocol, will that give them enough information or do we need to use a different protocol?