Work being done by Scarborough Middle School students is used by George Washington University to teach college students about Maine beaches.

For the past several years middle school students have been measuring Scarborough Beach and East Grand Avenue Beach once a month to track erosion and accretion – natural sand build-up on the shore – as part of a statewide project.

Using two measuring sticks tied together, the students move from the dunes to the water measuring the ground’s height. At each point they note the height, which is recorded in a notebook by a third student.

Once the measurements are completed, the data is entered into two Web sites. The first is a statewide Web site run by the Maine Sea Grant for its Beach Profile Monitoring program. The data will be used to form a long-term picture of coastal processes on the state’s sandy beaches and will help determine management action on beaches with chronic erosion. In addition, the students submit photographs they take suing the surveys.

The students also have their own Web site where they enter the information. The site also contains lessons for teachers and links related to coastline ecology.

It is this Web site that is being used by students at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Curriculum and Technology Integration Specialist Jim Doane, who has been running the beach monitoring project, sent the site to a professor who profiled Scarborough Beach every year with a group of students. Today the site is being used as a resource for his students as they prepare to visit Maine and conduct their own beach profiling.

Doane said the profiling project conducted by the students has been a real benefit. They get to learn about technology while undertaking scientific surveys using scientific equipment that is used by the state for its own investigations.

What the class has learned so far about erosion at Scarborough Beach is that a lot of sand does wash away from the beaches during the winter, but it usually returns during the summer, an effect that is noticeable from one month to the next.

Doane, who also is a lifeguard at the beach, was unaware of the Gorge Washington students using Scarborough Beach until he saw a letter from biology Professor Robert Knowlton. Doane contacted him about his students’ work and has kept the university up-to-date on what his class in doing, including the Web site and Internet-based data collection system.

“We’re proud he’s using the Web site we built for instructing his college students,” Doane said.

On Monday morning the students had a chance to work with the George Washington students, who were at Scarborough Beach performing their own beach profile, although a bit more in depth than what the middle school students perform.

George Washington students have been coming to Maine since the early 1970s to study the shoreline. This year they also will travel to the Darling Center in Walpole and Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.

Knowlton leads the nine-student class in applied marine ecology along with an assistant professor and a teaching assistant. They spent the afternoon sampling the sand around the beach and will later investigate the collection using facilities at Bowdoin College.

The purpose of the class is to study the dynamics of the beach, he said. It focuses on the human impact of the coast. When the class started there was considerable amount of pollution found on the coast and while that has changed some, it still needs some work.

Eight Grader Glen Harmon (left) and seventh grader Kyle Stanton, measuring the height of Scarborough Beach on Monday as part of a statewide beach profiling project.