Community is her lab; citizens are her scientists

Aug. 18, 2026 — DENTON — Not all scientists wear lab coats. And not all research is conducted in a lab. 

Instead, Dr. Kelly Albus is focused on building citizen scientists in her communities at Texas Woman’s University — and in Denton. 

“I’m a different kind of scientist,” she said. 

Her specialty? Building rain gardens, a bioretention tool to help hold and clean stormwater in areas prone to flooding. It can be as simple or complex as the project area needs but the basics stand: Dig into the ground where it floods, put in compost and soil, then add native plants that thrive in water. Add some pollinators or other plants to create more of an ecosystem, and you have a garden.

Now for the first time, she’s going to build a rain garden on the Denton campus. Albus will lead an interdisciplinary project to bring the garden to life at the edge of campus near the new walking trails. 

“My big thing is citizen science, and citizen science is when non professionals participate in scientific research, so volunteers, students and the general public can contribute,” she said. “So they will do biodiversity monitoring, water quality collection and assessment. We do soil testing and we do plant growth coverage. We can see how the addition of a rain garden changes with all of those different things.” 

Previous students of Albus helped propose the campus project and are excited to work on seeing it to fruition in the spring. Students will work on coursework to build up for the work to truly begin in the spring semester, from a visual arts class designing signage to a history class learning about environmental activism. Then students will help dig, plant and maintain the rain garden. 

The idea to build rain gardens in North Texas started with an idea to understand the barriers of installing more “green-blue infrastructure,” a development style where engineers use more nature-based solutions to manage storm water. Albus wanted to know why more didn’t exist when people tend to like it and it works. She wanted to know how to change the perception issue. 

She realized that hands-on data collection is the key to science education and a noticeable gap of going from knowledge to behavior changes in environmental education. Conducting a rain garden project pulls in a lot of people, is relatively inexpensive and makes a noticeable difference in the ecology of a local area, Albus said. 

“We tell people all the time ‘conserve, conserve,’ but how often does that change behavior? Not very often,” she said. “So where’s the gap? Rain gardens help fill that gap, because rain gardens are hands-on, applied demonstrations that everyone can take ownership of.” 

While she was working for Texas A&M AgriLife, she secured a grant for her first rain garden project on the campus of Ryan High School in Denton. Through work with the school and volunteers with the Elm Fork Chapter of the Texas Master Naturalists, the community built a large rain garden with 40 different plants, ranging from native plant Turk’s Cap to herbs for the culinary students to use. 

Since it opened in May 2025, volunteers and students tend to the garden multiple times a week, document its progress to create time-lapse photos and continue to test the incoming and outgoing water to see how much the garden is cleaning the water.

The benefits also go beyond what students and volunteers are learning. The garden helps reduce flooding and offset rapid development, and in turn improves the ecology of the ground that surrounds the garden.

“So why rain gardens? Because anybody can do it,” Albus said. “They’re small, they’re cheap, you can do it in your own backyard, if you have a natural depression that naturally floods, put some engineered soils and native plants in there and it will improve your water quality, improve your whole lawn and improve your soil.”

Because of the success of the initial project, it also laid the groundwork for other communities to create their own projects. Albus created teaching materials for high school students and is helping facilitate projects popping up in places like Flower Mound and Waxahachie this fall. 

“On campuses, all the young people who get exposed to this eventually will become land owners and hopefully they’re better informed about what to plant,” she said. “We’ve got some learning to do, but that’s why I do community-based work.”

Page last updated 4:27 PM, August 18, 2026