Say Hello to the Naturemobile!
You might start noticing a bright minivan out on the roads, it’s hard to miss. What was once a plain white Toyota Sienna hybrid has been transformed into a mobile representation of our region’s natural habitats.
We’re calling it the Naturemobile.
Each side of the van features a different local habitat, with landscapes photographed at our actual nature preserves! Now we can use the van itself as a teaching tool when our education team is out with a school group or at a community event. Participants can get a detailed look at some of the plants and wildlife, like monarch butterflies, that call these places home, even if they’re not visible that day or season.
Everywhere our Education and Community Programs team travels, the van brings the preserves along with them. The back features our Quakertown Swamp preserve with a Great Blue Heron and a green darner dragonfly. One side shows Croydon Woods Nature Preserve, with an Eastern box turtle, scarlet tanager, orb weaver spider, and Eastern bluebird. The other side is Jackson Pond’s meadow, featuring a red-tailed hawk, a bumblebee on New England aster, a black swallowtail caterpillar, and a monarch butterfly.
Our Education team is always on the move, and the van hauls our collection of hands-on, interactive equipment to schools, community events, and student field experiences at our preserves. Inside the van, you’re likely to find equipment for macroinvertebrate studies like microscopes, sampling gear, and everything needed to explore stream ecology in a classroom or out in nature, plus our awesome team of environmental educators! There’s also our interactive Enviroscape model, a large watershed simulation that helps students of all ages understand how what happens on land directly affects our water. It weighs about 20 lbs and is the size of a large suitcase — good thing we have a van!
Our goal is to make nature tangible, exciting, and accessible for all students. When a student is peering through a microscope at an aquatic insect or watching a rainstorm wash “pollution” across a model landscape, these experiences support a lifelong appreciation for nature in our communities.
So if you spot the Naturemobile cruising through your neighborhood or rolling up to a local school, give a honk! It means our Education and Community Programs team is nearby, bringing nature to everyone.
Partial funding for the Naturemobile was provided by a grant from the William Penn Foundation.
