April is an important month for spring cleaning and celebrating life forms and natural resources at Alewife. Friends groups of Alewife Reservation, Jerry's Pond and Fresh Pond all celebrated the coming of spring with cleanups and youth activities, leaving most of the Alewife area devoid of familiar trash, with the exception of the Route 16 rotary area. At Alewife and Fresh Pond, volunteer surveyors captured interesting species with cell phones and noted plants, birds and a newly reported reptile, the Northern Brown snake, which was identified by Earthwatch Research Director Stan Rullman.

At Alewife Reservation, residents and families from surrounding towns Somerville, North Shore and Cambridge came for the annual state-wide cleanup. Earth Watch visitor Mike Mulqueen taught visitors how to post their species findings on the website iNaturalist.com, which pools and ID's nature photos among common species within specific local or world-wide locations, e.g. Alewife urban wild.

As participants located biodiversity, the participants also cleaned 6 sections of the Reservation by recycling materials and gathering large amounts of trash as requested by MA Park Serve Day DCR directives and duplicated across the Commonwealth. Volunteers removed 6 cubic yards of trash at Alewife Reservation and 3 cubic yards at Jerry's Pond. Also on board at Alewife was the New England Aquarium's Live Blue Service Corps, supervised by Evan Henerberry.

"The cleanup", said President Ellen Mass, "comes at a most important time, when high levels of Cambridge development are impacting the rare city resources such as recent presence of a dead swan and weakened duck, and turbid smelly water at the storm water wetland, preventing water fowl nesting."

Alarming water change qualities and colors were also noted by passers-by just below new construction on Route 2 at the city wetlands. FAR requested testing for the area's discharge areas, which flow to Little River. Afterwards, a clean bill of water quality was given by Haley and Aldrich international consultant firm. Many monitors and stewards are needed to protect the open space along the "Alewife Corridor", as the Earthos Insititute Tufts Symposium highlighted recently.