What if I told you that a butterfly is the reason our ecosystem is thriving? That’s right, butterflies my be tiny but they have a huge impact on our environment. 

I, with the help of my group (Sven, Daniel, Liann, Emilia, Madeline), just finished a project where we strived to answer the driving question, how can we support and protect local pollinators to ensure healthy ecosystems in our community? This was not any old project, it was very important because it was presented to the public at the 2025 spring exhibition.

The Project

We were assigned with creating a booth that educated the public about our assigned pollinators (mine was butterflies). Our booth had to include many aspects, including a pamphlet, an ecosystem food web, a call to action, an interactive element, and food!

My Answer to the Driving Question

Pollinators play a huge part in the world, without them our ecosystems would crumble. Before doing this project, I had no clue how important they were, and I had no clue they were in need of help. In order to support and protect local pollinators we need to spread the word. We need to communicate it to people and make the cause known. If more people are aware of how to help pollinators and start to do their part, such as using the app iNaturalist and planting native plants, the ecosystems in our community will start to thrive. 

How I Got There

Pamphlet

Within this project we created a pamphlet about pollination in order to educate the public about pollination and how it works. Before creating this pamphlet we had to educate ourselves all about pollination, we learned about the different ways of reproduction such as mitosis, asexual reproduction, meiosis, and sexual reproduction. We then learned the parts of a flower and how they work. We then created a pamphlet that we gave out during the exhibition to educate people on what we learned. Knowing what pollination is  and how it works helped me answer the driving question because it made me aware about how pollination is helping keep our ecosystem healthy.

Food Web

If butterflies die off then all of the plants they pollinate would have no way of reproduction and would disappear. Then, all of the animals that ate those animals would lose a primary food source and die off. And then, the animals that eat those animals would die off. And so on. And so on. Ultimately leading to a crumbled ecosystem. This is why butterflies are so important to keep our planet flourishing.

We created a food web where we connected butterflies to other plants and animals in our ecosystem. We then had to showcase what would happen to all of the plants and animals on our food web if butterflies were to disappear. This part of the project really helped me understand why butterflies and other pollinators are detrimental for keeping our ecosystem healthy and thriving.

Call to Action

After we learned about what pollination is and why butterflies are so important, we had to spread the word. Involving others in saving the butterflies is a major part of reaching and sustaining a healthy ecosystem. We did this by creating 2 calls to action.

First, we created a poster about the nonprofit organization Butterflyway, which focuses on planting butterfly way gardens, supplying butterflies with more habitat, giving them more flowers to pollinate, and helping them thrive. We then created a butterfly garden simulation where we got people to create pipe cleaner flowers (making sure they were native species), then plant them in the garden (green foam), and watch the butterflies flutter on them (we placed paper butterflies). This simulation demonstrated how important it is for butterflies to have a habitat and flowers, because if you took all of the flowers away, there would just be butterflies with no where to go, and then they would eventually die off.

For our second call to action we created an informational poster about the app seek and iNaturalist. Seek is an app that identifies plants and animals when you take a photo of it. You then have to option to send it to iNaturalist, doing this sends you photo to scientists giving them data and helping them to know what is going on in our environment and letting them know where and what they should help. We also created a butterfly Photo Booth giving the public a way to practice taking photos of butterflies, as they would do when using seek.

2025 Spring Exhibition

If you have read some of my past blog posts you would know that PLP does an exhibition twice a year, giving us an opportunity to showcase our learning to the public. I believe the exhibition went quite well this year. Everyone in our group knew what they were talking about which made our explanations to the public very effective and people were drawn to our booth because of our fun activities.

F.A.I.L (First attempts in learning)

If I were to do anything in this project differently I would have spent more time on designing our booth. Other groups had tents and very eye catching booths which drew people in. At the beginning of the project we had a plan to make big flowers to put on either side of our booth. If we had more time I would have absolutely followed through with this plan, creating a way more interesting engaging booth.