PORTSMOUTH — Portsmouth Middle School seventh-graders put their thinking caps on last week to solve some of the pollution problems that plague waterways.

“We’re calling this the Wetland Engineering Fair because all the projects are connected to a wetland,” said Kim O’Neill, who organized the learning project along with Sarah deCiutiis. Both are seventh-grade science teachers at the school.

“For over a quarter, the students have been learning about healthy ecosystems and then students are also learning how to maintain a healthy wetland,” Ms. O’Neill said. “They were given one of three degraded wetlands — Narragansett Bay, Chesapeake Bay and then Indian River Lagoon in Florida. They had to take all the knowledge they learned and identity the problems of wetlands and then come up with solutions by working as a team.”

Ella Widner worked with a team that studied Chesapeake Bay.

“The main problem with our estuary was air pollution because it caused climate change,” Ella said. “That was killing aquatic animals because of the change in water temperature. Our solution was to remove the factories that cause air pollution and replace them wth solar panels in all places where we could.”

The other problem the team faced with the ecosystem was runoff from the farms. 

“We removed the farms and instead added filter-feeders and rocks to filter out sediments from getting into the water, making the animals’ lives longer,” she said. “Nothing really surprised me, but I learned how simple changes can change the lives of animals in an estuary.”

One of the most visually striking projects was put together by Vanessa Gould, Mia Luciana, Nicholas Mirisolo and Eric Morales. They built a scale model of Narragansett Bay, complete with a replica of the Newport Bridge, which took them about five days.

“We learned there was a lot of plastic pollution and there’s not a lot of eelgrass left because of that pollution,” said Vanessa.

Learning about estuaries

Sage Qaisar, Hayden White, Isabel Welker and Sally Xu got to use a large digital monitor to help them present their project, for which they built a model of the Indian River Lagoon.

“It took us about two weeks to get the information and build this,” said Isabel. “The funnest part was building it. Even though we did run out of the materials that we wanted, we still had a bunch more.”

“We had to work together to build a lot of the different parts, and we had to brainstorm: What would that look like? And what should we include?” added Hayden.

Sage said he learned about all the different ways to reduce pollution in a wetland, such as filtration. 

“There’s multiple ways you can do that, such as putting in vegetation to stop all the chemicals from getting in,” he said.

Hayden said he learned a lot of about ecosystems in general. 

“I didn’t really know what an estuary was and I didn’t even know that we lived near one so close by,” he said.