BATON ROUGE — Students from several East Baton Rouge schools gathered at the LSU Center for River Studies on the Water Campus in Baton Rouge on Monday to launch GPS trackers into the Mississippi River.

The project, led by the Global Geospatial Institute, provided students with GPS trackers allowing them to collect live data and map litter movement through the river in real time. 

Students from Park Forest Middle School for Coastal and Environmental Studies, Park Forest Creative Sciences and Arts Magnet Elementary School and Jefferson Terrace Academy learned how geospatial data helps scientists, planners and engineers understand complex environmental systems.