Nicodemus Wilderness Project -- Global Registry of Apprentice Ecologists

My dark sky project was very meaningful to me in lots of ways. It was about light pollution in the Indianapolis area. To start out, I got a grant from the United Way of Central Indiana to buy a Dark Sky Meter. This meter quantifies the amount of light in the sky when you point it directly up and press a button. I wanted to go to ten different parks in the Indianapolis area and take measurements of the light pollution at each park.
Throughout the course of the project, it evolved in lots of ways but in the end, it has been very successful. It started out as a mission to measure the amount of light pollution at different parks in the Indianapolis area to be able to compare them and find something useful with the information. During the summer of 2016, I gathered all of that data and was able to compare different parts of the city to each other. As fall came, I realized that I needed an end goal with this project and an environmental implication that would be meaningful to the community. As I researched different things that are affected by light pollution, I came to realize that moths are the most important and most relevant for a city like Indianapolis. Moths are big pollinators, so they are essential to agriculture, which is something that the state of Indiana heavily depends on. Moths are attracted to light, and their regular eating, sleeping, mating, and pollinating patterns are altered by artificial lights in their habitats. My goal was to go to take the data I gathered from each park and compare it to amounts of light pollution other places where moth behavior has been monitored and recorded. That way I would be able to hypothesize what the moth behavior would be like at each of these local parks. With that information, I am able to reach out to each individual park with ways that they can help to protect their moths and conserve these very important pollinators.
Another goal of my project is to educate the community. So far, I have given presentations about moths, light pollution, and my research to both high school and elementary school students. Everybody I have talked to has been very interested in this and wants to do something to enact change in their communities. I also have several more presentations scheduled in the future.
Overall, it has been a wonderful and meaningful project to me where I have learned a lot and hopefully impacted a lot of people to be more conscious of their individual amounts of light pollution.

Note: The photo submitted is a picture I took in downtown Indianapolis which highlights the amount of light pollution there, that photo was taken at 10:30 pm, so there is no light left from the sun, all of the light seen is artificial.