Utilising the natural marine environment on the doorstep of Whananaki Primary School has won them a national competition.
The school is inspiring a new generation of eco-warriors and now thanks to a $5000 prize from Canon the pupils will be able to photograph and video their seaside research and provide a visual record online for future generations.
The schoolgrounds border the Whananaki estuary which includes the footbridge connecting the north and south sides of the coastal community for pedestrians. The waterway has become their extended classroom.
Information collected by the pupils is being loaded to a website run by the NZ Marine Studies Centre at the University of Otago as part of its Marine Metre Squared project.
The project was launched, nationwide, during Seaweek 2013 and participants load information about what they find on their local shore to the website to map and graph their data for comparison over time, between regions and between species.