One of the most important activities, which our school takes part in is The Air Pollution Project Europe. It is organized by the Norwegian Society for the Conversation of Nature in cooperation with many organizations and public bodies round the world.

The aim of this project is to increase school children's knowledge of air pollution, which causes acid rain and many other problems with the natural environment. By carrying out the investigation themselves, we can achieve a greater understanding of how the environment is being damaged, and realize that each one of us can do something to prevent it happening.

This project is divided into two parts; Measuring the acidity of the rain and registration of lichens.

Acid Rain Project

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Thirteen pupils from the seven classes of school built the rain collectors. They recorded the pH values and the amount of precipitation on a recording card which were later sent to the Norwegian Society for the Conversation of Nature. Then all the pH values not only from our country, but from many other European countries were entered in a computer program which helped to get some important results. All those pupils carried out daily measurements during the same four week period in October and November. Where it was possible, the rain was collected in plastic bags, which were changed each day. To check how acid was the rain they used pH indicator scripts with the colour scale marked off in 0,5 pH units. What is very important, in our results, we have not allowed for the amount of precipitation and that is why they can be a little bit careless.

The results of our experiment were rather surprising. We established that the average pH of Nowy Sšcz is about 4,5 and outside the town it is 5,9. The big difference between the town and the suburb was really amazing for us. We did not think that it would be so big. However, following the instructions from Norway we classified the rains in the town as acidic and in other places as non acidic. For us and our teachers the experiment was really successful.

The Lichen Project

Lichen is the plant group in nature that clearly tells us if the air is polluted with sulphur. Lichen is found everywhere if the air is clean enough and it is known as ?Nature's sulphur detector? because it is so sensitive to sulphur.

They put the results of their observations on special papers prepared by the Norwegian Society for the Conversation of Nature.

One of our friend's tasks was to find out how much of the tree trunk was covered by the different lichens. In order to do this, they used a frame, 15 x 15cm.

The most important for them were the fruticose lichens, because they are more sensitive to the sulphur than the others. We are glad, that we were able to find some of them on the trees we were observing. It is a pity that there were not many of these lichens but still it means that the air in our region is not so polluted. The other group is the foliose lichens which tolerate pollution slightly better than fruticose ones. However we can say that these lichens have a problem surviving in towns with polluted air because there were not a lot of them in our town. Many more we have found in a suburb and in villages surrounding Nowy Sacz. The last group were the crustose lichens. We have found most of them, both in our town and woodlands and farmlands. This results suggest that crustose lichen is less sensitive to local pollution and probably this is a reason why that group of lichens were found in much greater numbers than the other leichen groups in areas with pollution.