About Us

Endangered New Jersey began as a website built in 1999 for the ThinkQuest website competition for students.

It was designed to be about endangered and threatened wildlife of the United States with a special focus on New Jersey, and it was built by three sixth-grade students and their two teacher-coaches.

Original website home page

My son, Drew, was one student member and he had participated in the ThinkQuest Internet competition in 1998 with an entry title What's In A Name. That entry was a 1998 Finalist and received several other Internet awards, and in its first year on the still-new World Wide Web, it received over 35,000 visitors during the competition. (It was a website about the meanings and origins of names. An expanded version of it is at Why Name It That? ) Encouraged by his success, and determined to place in the top three in 1999, he decided to try again.

Teaming up with his friends, Brandon Lane and James Kegley, and enlisting me and one of their teachers, Barbara Ann Ellert, as their content and technology coaches, the team started work.

They chose endangered species because it is studied in almost all elementary schools and is popular with kids. There are many sites about it but there were no sites about local New Jersey species.

I had been a volunteer with the state's Wildlife Conservation Corps for several years and knew that few pages showed up at the time on search engines including the official New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's own site.

As part of the site, the team needed images and needed to get the rights to use them. They first approached the state website's webmaster and the office of the Endangered and Nongame Species Program. Happily, both were enthusiastic about the project and offered their site's information and the graphics found there.

The site had 3 main areas:

1. the species (which would be subdivided into birds, reptiles, mammals, etc.)
2. topics about endangered species in general (definitions, causes, etc.)
3. a section that the coaches would concentrate on (teacher links, citations, updates, promotion, permissions, etc.)

We also sent out about ten e-mail permission requests to sites we found with useful photos. We told them that we were creating an educational website for ThinkQuest and asked if we could use any of their photos on our site. We said that we would credit the photos to them and include a link to their site on our sources page. The team received a positive response from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and from two other sites. A few never answered. Two told us that they didn't have the rights to the photos themselves. And two others said we could not use their photos but could link to their pages if we wished.

The site was uploaded on March 31, 1999, and we notified the State of New Jersey's Department of Environmental Protection about the site and hoped they would recognize our efforts. They did and even provided a link to us on their site.

The site was selected as a Gold Award Winner in the Science and Math category.

In June 1999, the Cedar Grove Board of Education presented the team members with a proclamation of congratulations. The Star-Ledger, NJ's largest newspaper, did a great feature story on the team and the site including a color photo of the students under the headline "Masters of the Web."

By September 1, 1999, the team had received emails from teachers, students (elementary school through college), several biologists, and Scout leaders who had visited the site and used our resources. Frequently, we received technical questions which we tried our best to answer or at least give a link or e-mail address they could try.

One biologist contacted us about a species correction and was amazed to discover when we replied that the site was created by three students when they were in sixth grade. "I thought it was an official site! I'm very impressed!" he replied.

The site was featured on New Jersey Search and was included in their search engine database as one of the "NJ Proud" sites.

The team presented a program along with the Conserve Wildlife Foundation at their former elementary school and received plaques of appreciation from the association for "promoting wildlife conservation awareness to the citizens of New Jersey."

We also made a slide presentation on endangered species at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars meeting. A member of the group had seen the site in a newspaper feature and contacted us. The VFW post presented certificates of appreciation to the team members for their "service to the community."

The site was also featured in an article in the magazine New Jersey Outdoors in 2000.

An archived version of the original site is at wayback.archive-it.org

This blog is my attempt to revive, update and expand the scope of the original site to include other topics about the diverse environments and species found in New Jersey, the challenges we face, and what you can do to enjoy and protect them.

Ken Ronkowitz

Contact me at endangerednj at gmail.com