Crossing Boundaries

GIS lesson analyzing tornado activity

This UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Educational, Scientific,and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) training kit is a train-the-trainer tool that aims to promote sustainable consumption patterns among young consumers worldwide.

"In this 50-question activity, you will determine the best locations to site a wind energy farm in Colorado. You will use GIS as your primary investigative tool and use spatial analysis techniques to consider the best site. You will consider highways, wind speed, cities, size of polygon, contiguity, elevation, federal land, and will perform a number of geoprocessing functions including dissolve, intersect, erase, join, and more to arrive at your conclusion. "

Students will look at maps and satellite images to see how various settled parts of the Earth have changed over the past few decades. They will then draw maps of their hometown, showing how it might have looked in satellite images in the 1970s and today. This will probably require some research into their town's recent history.

tool to map administrative region data stored in Excel spreadsheets without the need for GIS

Mapping climate patterns, tornadoes, hurricanes, seismic activity, ecoregions and urban forests.

Students will discuss the importance of maintaining ecosystems and will learn about the various arguments that people make in favor of preserving the Earth's biodiversity.

"In this lesson students examine the patterns of gray whale migration along the Pacific Coast of North America. The exercise provides data at both broad and local scales, providing students with migration patterns and local scale feeding patterns. "

Fostering Learning in the Networked World: Executive Summary

Understand how floods occur, and why floodplains are important to communities, with a case study of Boulder, Colorado, USA.

NatureServe and its network of member programs are a leading source for reliable scientific information about species and ecosystems of the Western Hemisphere. This site serves as a portal for accessing several types of publicly available biodiversity data.

GIS and Science News, resources, commentary, and interviews on the use of GIS for science.

Welcome to the Urban Bird Sounds Project! This project will teach you to recognize bird sounds in the city. You can see all these birds in the city of Boston --and maybe in your city also.

developed for a course entitled "Ecology for Teachers". This distance-ed graduate level course is designed for in-service high school teachers enrolled in a Multidiscplinary Science Masters Degree offered at Texas Tech University. This course is intended to provide teachers with the background necessary to teach ecology content at the high school level. My philosophy is that teachers are the experts in the pedagogies that are most effective for teaching their students. My job in this course is to provide the content knowledge necessary for teachers to be able to create effective learning opportunities for their students.

BioKIDS: Kids' Inquiry of Diverse Species addresses both inquiry and life science content standards through exploration of local biodiversity, collection of animal species, and the investigation of individual animals and how animals interact with one another. Through these activities students will gain a clearer understanding of how organisms meet their basic needs and the role the environment plays in supporting a variety of organisms. In this curriculum, students use CyberTracker, an animal-tracking program that runs on hand-held computers (PDAs), to log animal sightings in their schoolyard. Students then analyze the data for class and team experiments. Another salient feature of the curriculum is the Critter Catalog, an on-line animal species database developed by the BioKIDS team. Students use this as the main resource when they write species accounts (conduct research on individual animals).

HabitatNet is a global biodiversity monitoring project developed by NH science teacher, Dan Bisaccio. He and his students are actively involved with the Smithsonian Institution's Monitoring & Assessment Biodiversity Project. In January of 2005, HabitatNet/Souhegan High School with the Smithsonian Institution, Amigos de Sian Ka´an UNESCO Bio-Reserve and El Eden Ecological Reserve hosted the First International Earth Summit for Youth on Global Biodiversity. Students and teachers from the United States, France, India, Germany, Italy, Puerto Rico, the Netherlands and Mexico participated in the event.

Creatures large and small may play an unsuspectedly important role in the stirring of ocean waters, according to a study released Wednesday.

A recent study reports that high school students who study fewer science topics, but study them in greater depth, have an advantage in college science classes over their peers who study more topics and spend less time on each. The study relates the amount of content covered on a particular topic in high school classes with students' performance in college-level science classes.

"CUGIR is an active online repository in the National Spatial Data Clearinghouse program. CUGIR provides geospatial data and metadata for New York State, with special emphasis on those natural features relevant to agriculture, ecology, natural resources, and human-environment interactions."