Lawn Lab

Lawn Lab is an innovative program to give K-12 students hands-on experiences doing authentic scientific research and improve pollinator habitat in Fauquier County. Starting in fall 2025, an Education Fellow at the Clifton Institute will be responsible for coordinating Lawn Lab with the participating schools. We need $10,000 to keep her on for the whole school year. 

Started in 2024, Lawn Lab is a long-term habitat restoration experiment and partnership between the Clifton Institute, the Fauquier County Public School system, and Fauquier County’s We Need Bees Committee, which oversees the county’s status as a Bee City USA affiliate. In this project, students from Grace Miller Elementary School and Liberty High School, along with educators and scientists from the Clifton Institute, will study the effects of reducing mowing on the biodiversity of lawns. Two one-acre squares of an old playing field (see map below) will be mowed only once a year in the winter, while an adjacent one-acre square will be mowed once a week as usual. Students will compare the species of plants and animals in the long grass (mowed once in winter) and those in the nearby short grass (mowed weekly spring through fall). Ultimately, the lessons students learn from this experiment will help inform the county, our wide network of landowners, and the scientific community with whom we’ll share our results on how to transform under-utilized stretches of lawn into habitat for native plants and animals. Because of Lawn Lab,

1. Hundreds of students get outdoors and connect with the plants and animals in their backyard
2. Virginia Standards of Learning concepts (life cycles, food webs, succession) and skills (making observations, conducting scientific investigations, analyzing data, drawing conclusions) are reinforced through hands-on experiences doing authentic scientific research
3. FCPS reduces the money they spend on groundskeeping and the emissions caused by mowing
4. Scientists, teachers, students, government officials, groundskeepers, and community partners come together to improve pollinator habitat in Fauquier County