Youth to Take Part in Conservation of National Parks at Nuuksio

Nuuksio National Park is the first protected area in Finland to arrange Junior Ranger programme activities aimed at 11-15 year olds. The programme kicked off with a camp organised in Nuuksio National Park August 4-6, 2009, at which 15 young people gathered to camp and worked for nature conservation. The camp was organised as a joint project between Metsähallitus and the Uusimaa College for Rural Development. Our goal is to expand the Junior Ranger programme and make it a nation wide. Next year, in addition to the camp in Southern Finland, similar ones are to be held in Ostrobothnia and Lapland.

At the camp, participants became familiar with the national park’s magnificent landscape and history while camping there. The area’s birds, butterflies, moths, bats and dung beetles played an important part in the learning process. At times participants also had the opportunity to take hold of a shovel or axe. Diversity was restored in small bodies of water by damming streams and so forcing them to follow their original stream bed. The campers also restored the national park’s old commercial forest in order to add diversity, by removing bark from tree trunks, so that trees will begin to decay and thus offer a habitat for those species which thrive on decaying wood. New nesting boxes were set up for bats and Kattilan polku Trail got a new gate.

The Junior Ranger programme is a combination of living outdoors, practical work and nature experiences. It can be seen as a cross-section of a national park employee’s everyday work and events schedule. The aim of the programme is to impart information on the reasons why protected areas are established and the conservation work done within them. The best way to learn is by doing and so the camp participants will be doing just that.

Junior rangers carry out the same tasks as Finnish forest rangers. Forest rangers were needed in Finland one hundred years ago to protect the state’s valuable property: trees and game animals. Today nature and landscape are protected for a multitude of reasons. Today rangers are basic employees in national parks. Rangers’ tasks include construction, maintenance and repair work, as well as, helping in research and offering guidance to visitors.

The Junior Ranger programme is coordinated by the EUROPARC Federation, and takes place in numerous European countries. EUROPARC organizes an international Junior Ranger Camp annually, where young people can meet up and get to know Junior Rangers from other countries.

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Nuuksio nationalpark
• Europarc (www.europarc.org)