The Massachusetts Envirothon “Current Issue” applies the National Envirothon topic to our state context and emerging needs. It invites your Massachusetts Envirothon Team (Team) to become visionary problem-solvers and environmental stewards, leading the charge toward more resilient, water-conscious neighborhoods across the Commonwealth!
The 2027 Massachusetts Envirothon Current Issue Rubric will be provided shortly.
The time limit for Current Issue presentations will be 15 minutes + 5 minutes for Q&A.
Digging Deeper:
Building Resilience from the Ground Up
Through hands-on learning, critical and creative thinking, and community engagement, your Team will explore how healthy soils can help Massachusetts communities become more resilient to climate-related stressors. By examining how development affects soil health and function, your Team will identify practical strategies to protect, restore, and maintain healthy soils before, during, and after development—helping to build more resilient communities.
Understanding, Protecting, and Improving the Soils Beneath Us
We walk on it, build on it, grow food in it, and depend on it to filter and store water. Yet soil is often overlooked as an essential natural resource. Soil is a complex, living ecosystem made up of layers, minerals, organic matter, air, water, microorganisms, fungi, plants, and animals that interact with one another and their environment.
Healthy soil performs essential functions that support both ecosystems and communities. It absorbs and stores water, cycles and supplies nutrients, supports vegetation, reduces erosion, stores carbon, and provides habitat for a remarkable diversity of organisms. A soil’s physical structure, chemical properties, and biological activity determine how well it can perform these functions.
However, the way we use and manage land can affect soil health. Construction and development, agriculture, landscaping, road salt, compaction, erosion, pollution, vegetation removal, and other human activities can alter the physical, chemical, and biological properties of soil.
Whether your community is urban, suburban, rural, or a combination of all three, your Team will dig deeper into the soils in your community. You will investigate how land use and development affect soil health, identify an important local soil-health concern, and develop a realistic strategy to protect, restore, or maintain healthy soils.
Through hands-on learning, critical and creative thinking, and community engagement, your Team will explore how healthy soils can help communities adapt to climate-related stressors and build resilience from the ground up.
Your Team’s Current Issue Journey
Your Team will embark on an exploration of soil and its profound influence on our environmental and communities.
- How healthy is the soil in your community?
Your investigation should explore four key questions:
1. What soils and soil functions are found in our community?
2. How are local soils being used, managed, and affected by land development?
3. What factors are affecting soil health and its ability to provide important ecological functions and benefits?
4. What can our community do to protect, restore, and maintain healthy soils and build resilience?
Your team should investigate soil as a living, functioning community resource—one that supports water quality, biodiversity, food production, carbon storage, and climate resilience—not simply as a medium for growing plants.
- Know Your Soil
Investigate the characteristics of soils in your community. Use available soil surveys, maps, field observations, soil tests, interviews, and other reliable information.
Identify your soil type, then answer the following: What are the general properties/health conditions of these soil types, broadly? How are these similar/different to your samples? Consider physical health (e.g., soil texture, compaction, erosion, etc.), chemical health (e.g., soil pH, organic matter, nutrient availability, etc.) and biological health (e.g., earthworms, plant roots, fungi, etc.)
Your Team does not need to measure every characteristic. Instead, identify the characteristics that are most important to understand soil health in your community.
- Explore Your Community
Begin by identifying the major ways soil is used and impacted by climate and development throughout your community. Your community may contain a variety of land uses, such as:
- Residential neighborhoods
- Parks and recreational fields
- Farms and agricultural land
- Forests
- School grounds
- Community gardens
- Vacant lots
- Roads and transportation corridors
- Commercial and industrial properties
- Construction and redevelopment sites
- Siting for clean energy sources, distribution, and generation
- Wetlands and open space
- Shorelines or waterfront areas
Map or otherwise document several locations that represent different types of soil use or management.
Your Team should consider:
- The difference between soil disturbance, degradation, and erosion.
- Where is soil an important resource in our community, and how is it being used?
- Does the area require permissions to access?
- Is it safe to obtain a sample?
- Would you be disturbing the integrity of the soil (horizons, biome) by gathering a sample? If yes, consider another way to learn about the integrity of the soil, or choose another site.
- Identify A Soil-health Concern
Select one significant soil-health issue affecting your community. This can be a concern about soil health within your immediate community or as a result of down-stream or upstream effects from an adjacent community. Your issue could involve:
- Soil compaction
- Erosion
- Loss of topsoil
- Poor infiltration
- Loss of organic matter
- Nutrient loss
- Redeveloped brownfield for solar, battery storage, mixed use development or landfill
- Soil contamination
- Road salt
- Excessive disturbance
- Loss of vegetation
- Bare or exposed soil
- Degraded soils at construction sites
- Intensive lawn management
- Agricultural soil degradation
- Invasive plants
- Loss of soil biological activity
- Urban soil disturbance
Your Team should explain:
- What is happening?
- Where is it happening?
- Why is it happening?
- Who or what is affected?
- Why should the community care?
- Follow The Soil-Climate -Development Connection
Investigate how the soil-health issue you identified at your chosen site is affected by climate and can be impacted by development in your community. Some things to consider during your investigation can include erosion, carbon and/or water storage, drought, etc.
- Illustrate a pathway showing how soil health, climate and development affect each other .
Then identify how improving soil health could change that pathway.
Some examples of how improving soil health can impact climate change include:
- Erosion control
- Flood resilience
- Reduce drought impact
- Minimize soil disturbance
Some examples of how improving soil health can impact development include:
- Lower food production costs
- Higher crop yields
- Enhance infrastructure integrity
- Reduce maintenance costs
- Look At The Human Connection
Soil health is influenced by decisions people make about land. Investigate how at least one human activity in your community affects soil. Examples include:
- Development
- Agriculture
- Landscaping
- Lawn care
- Recreation
- Construction
- Road maintenance
- Snow and ice management
- Waste disposal
- Land conservation
- Forestry
Consider both positive and negative effects. Your Team should ask:
- How can the way people use land either protect soil or prevent the degradation of soil.
- Talk To Your Community
Connect your scientific investigation with people who understand how local land is managed. Interview at least one expert with cultural or academic knowledge relevant to your investigation. Potential contacts include:
- Farmers
- Local Gardeners
- Landscapers
- Municipal officials
- Conservation commissioners
- Public works staff
- Parks and recreation staff
- Engineers
- Soil scientists
- Conservation professionals
- Extension educators
- Environmental organizations
- Property managers
- Local residents
Ask questions that help you understand both the climate-science and the human side of your soil-health issue. For example:
- What soil problems have you observed locally? Are these problems related to climate change? If so, how?
- How has land use been developed over time?
- What practices are currently used to protect soil?
- What makes soil conservation difficult?
- Are there been barriers to change? If so, what are they? If not, why?
- Who is responsible for the land use at your chosen site?
- Develop A Community Soil-Health Solution
Your Team will propose one primary action that your community could take to address the soil-health concern you identified. Your solution could involve:
- Changing land-management practices
- Increasing vegetation or ground cover
- Improving soil infiltration
- Reducing compaction
- Adding organic matter
- Improving erosion control
- Changing landscaping practices
- Protecting existing healthy soils
- Improving construction practices
- Reducing contamination
- Restoring degraded soil
- Educating community members
- Changing municipal policies or practices
Your proposal must be realistic. Explain:
- What should be done?
- Where should it be done?
- Who should do it?
- How would it improve soil health?
- What other environmental benefits could result?
- What challenges or costs might be involved?
- Measure Success
How will you know whether your solution actually improves soil health? Develop a simple Soil Health Monitoring Plan. Identify at least three indicators that could be measured over time.
For each indicator, explain:
- What will you measure?
- How and how often will you measure it?
- What result would indicate improvement?
- Could a practice tested at one park be adopted throughout the town?
- Could a school soil-health project become a community program?
- Could a successful farm practice be adapted for residential landscapes?
- Could improving soil health in several small areas reduce a larger community-wide problem?
- Your Team should explain the potential community-wide impact of your recommendation.
- YOUR FINAL CHALLENGE
Your Team will present a Community Soil Health Action Plan to the judges. Your presentation should at least communicate:
- The site you chose
- What you learned about the soil health and function at your site
- The ways soil health at your site is likely affected by climate and development
- What good soil health means for your community
- Actions that can be taken to improve soil health
- How will you determine whether your solution works?
Create a simple scorecard evaluating your selected site. Rate its soil health in three categories:
| Category | Examples of characteristics |
| PHYSICAL | Structure, compaction, infiltration, erosion, water-holding capacity |
| CHEMICAL | pH, nutrients, organic matter, salts, contaminants |
| BIOLOGICAL | Organisms, roots, decomposition, biological activity |
Your Team should provide evidence supporting each rating. Then identify:
- The Greatest Strength – What is the soil already doing well?
- The Greatest Threat – What poses the greatest risk to its health?
- The Best Opportunity – What is the most realistic way to improve or protect it?
- Urban, Suburban, Or Rural?
- An urban Team might investigate compacted soils in a city park, vacant lot restoration, street-tree soils, or community gardens.
- A suburban Team might investigate lawns, school grounds, residential development, stormwater, or conservation land.
- A rural Team might investigate agricultural fields, forests, pasture, farm roads, erosion, or changing land use.
A community may contain all of these environments. There is no single correct soil-health problem or solution. The strongest projects will identify an issue that is locally important, investigate it using scientific evidence, and develop a solution that fits the community.
Resources And Tools
- USDA NRCS’s Web Soil Survey: Web Soil Survey (WSS) provides soil data and information produced by the National Cooperative Soil Survey. It is operated by the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and provides access to the largest natural resource information system in the world. NRCS has soil maps and data available online for more than 95 percent of the nation’s counties and anticipates having 100 percent in the near future.
- Soil vs. Dirt resource/definition
