A day in the life of a volunteer at CEDEVIS, The Sustainable Lifestyle Demonstration Centre!
Volunteering at CEDEVIS can involve lots of different kinds of work, depending on the project you are interested in. At CEDEVIS, you have the opportunity to use your creativity and initiative to start new projects, and contribute to existing ones. We are currently working on organic agriculture, creating interpretive trails, completing inventories of endemic and introduced species, ecological restoration, and environmental education projects. This is a good place to learn and gain experience in these areas, or to carry out your thesis research. We are currently collaborating on projects with World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Ecology Project International and the Charles Darwin Scientific Centre.
IS is lots of time for hard work and fun outdoors, in a beautiful and peaceful setting, where wild Galapagos Giant Tortoises roam!
Here is an example of a day in the life of a CEDEVIS volunteer:
8:00 am After you prepare and eat some breakfast you are ready to start out your day. Now is a good time for outdoor work, before the heat of the midday sun.
8-9 am Grab your machete, and give your arm muscles a workout clearing the path for an interpretive trail.
9-9:30 am Have a drink of water in the shade, and check up on the seedlings growing in the plant nurseries. Do the tomatoes need some more water? Better give them a drink, too!
9:30 – 10:30 am Get your gear together to help out with inventories of endemic and introduced plant species on the grounds of the farm. Pick a section of the farm that hasn’t been inventoried yet, and plot out sections where native plants of Galapagos are thriving, and sections where the invasive introduced species have taken over. Keep good records of your data, because it will be used in the plans for eradication of invasive species from the farmlands.
10:30 – 12:00 pm Hang out in the shade of the communal room, and treat yourself to a popsicle while you go through the plant identification books. Where there a few species that you didn’t recognize when you were out doing inventories? Once you have used the books to identify them, check if there is already a record of this plant on the farm. If not, cut a sample, and put it in the plant press. Once it has dried, you can add it to the herbarium and we will have a fuller record of the farm’s vegetation species.
