Crossing Boundaries

Understanding Science - how science really works

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

GIS lesson analyzing tornado activity

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.

"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."

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

CO2 map

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.

"We often think of rivers as following a given path for the course of its life, but really, the path changes over time as the flow cuts into the earth. The water flows through old and new and back again. In 1944, cartographer Harold Fisk mapped the current Mississippi River. It's the white trail. Then Fisk used old geological maps to display old paths. They're the old colored paths. And what you get is this long run of windy, snake-like things."

"The power of geographic and spatial information design is often an untapped resource. Much work done by advocacy organisations has some "spatial" element to it and includes data that can, when approached creatively, be easier to explore and understand when mapped or displayed visually. However, until recently, using computer mapping technologies proved to be incredibly challenging, expensive and time consuming and therefore often inappropriate for small and medium-sized organisations."

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.

"Trained as a musician, acoustic biologist Katy Payne was first to discover that humpback whales compose ever-changing song to communicate, and first to understand that elephants communicate with one another across long distances by infrasound. We hear what she has learned about life in this world from two of its largest and most mysterious creatures."

"Investigate the devastating earthquakes in January 2010 and compare them to past earthquakes using GIS as the investigative tool. Examine fault lines, population, ocean floors, plate boundaries, volcanoes, and other data to get a complete understanding of the physical and cultural geography of the Caribbean Sea region. "

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.

"GLOBE at Night is an annual citizen-science campaign that encourages people all over the world to record the brightness of their night sky. For two weeks every March, when the Moon is not out during the early evening and the constellation of Orion can be seen by everyone everywhere, children and adults match the appearance of Orion with 7 star maps of progressively fainter stars found on the website, www.globeatnight.org. They then submit their measurements (e.g., which star map they chose) on-line with their date, time and location."

"Understanding Sustainability is a flexible, self-contained two-week curriculum unit aligned with national science standards for middle school educators to teach sustainability issues. The curriculum unit features hands-on activities that explore sustainability issues, such as energy, consumption, water scarcity, transportation choices, and potential solutions. "

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

Global biodiversity using data for hotspots from Conservation International. Also relevant to the Citizenship curriculum.

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.

"Buy, Use, Toss? A Closer Look at the Things We Buy is an interdisciplinary unit that includes ten fully-planned lessons. This unit is correlated with national science and social studies standards and will lead your students through an exploration of the system of producing and consuming goods that is called the materials economy. Grades: 9-12 Subjects: Science, Social Studies"