Crossing Boundaries

"With soaring human populations and rapid climate change putting unprecedented pressure on species, conservationists must look to innovative strategies - from creating migratory corridors to preserving biodiversity hotspots - if we are to prevent countless animals and plants from heading to extinction."

"A collection of rubrics for assessing portfolios, cooperative learning, research process/ report, PowerPoint, podcast, oral presentation, web page, blog, wiki, and other web 2.0 projects."

journalist Fred Pearce reports on how the rapid spread of community-based, digital mapping is helping indigenous groups worldwide to claim ownership of their lands and protect them from logging and other outside development. From the Congo, to Guyana, to the Australian outback, local communities are increasingly using GPS technology and Google Earth to document their traditional forests, hunting areas, burial grounds, and important cultural sites. As Pearce writes, the aim is to produce maps that governments cannot ignore and that can assist local people in saving their homelands

Earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, wildfires... "IcEarth offers an innovative approach for the use of satellite and airborne remotely sensed data and current and historical aerial photography combined with an in-depth explanation of what the data represents. Images, technical application, and topical themes support environmental science, earth science, and geographic inquiry by complementing educators existing curriculum."

This article highlights some Citizen Science projects that you may want to get involved with personally and/or with your students. Links to websites are provided. There are all sorts of projects for monitoring organisms including but not limited to birds, frogs, fish, ladybugs, plants, even horseshoe crabs!

The Conservation Education Strategy Toolkit contains resources developed by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies (AFWA) to support conservation educators. Includes lots of useful stuff: downloadable lessons, "Benchmarks for Conservation Literacy," "Field Investigations: Using Outdoor Environments to Foster Student Learning of Scientific Processes" etc.

"Over the past few generations, conservation groups have spent billions of dollars on scientific research, land purchase, policy change and education to address these threats. But one question that has received little attention is: How do we get people to change their behavior? What really works?"

The EOL collection tool allows you to organize lists of species, information, media, maps, and sounds into a virtual collectionnthat you can annotate and share. Existing collections include "Darwin's Finches" and "Animal Phyla."

Giant snakes are eating their way through the Everglades, leaving a drastically changed ecosystem in their wake, a new study shows.

Using Storify you can create a story using media from different sections of the Web. After signing up for a free profile, you can "curate" elements of a story by dragging and dropping status updates, photos, or videos to make your own interactive presentation. You can write headlines and text.

"World population reaching seven billion is a great opportunity for you to incorporate environmental education and global studies into your classroom. The following teacher-friendly activities are classroom-ready and will get your students to actively engage in these timely issues. All of the lesson plans are correlated to the national content standards for eleven middle school subject areas. Themes: P = Population Dynamics E = Environmental Connections S = Societal Connections"

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times The strict new federal standards limiting pollution from power plants are meant to safeguard human health. But they should have an important side benefit, according to a study being released on Tuesday: protecting a broad array of wildlife that has been harmed by mercury emissions.

UC SANTA BARBARA (US) - Human land-use activity has begun to change the regional water and energy cycles of parts of the Amazon basin. A new study published in the journal Nature also shows ongoing interactions of deforestation, fire, and climate change have the potential to alter carbon storage, rainfall patterns, and river discharge on an even larger scale.

"...birds are now so food-deprived that they take up to twice as long replace their feathers, an annual process known as molt."

"From Brazil to Borneo, new roads are being built into tropical forests at a dizzying pace, putting previously intact wilderness at risk. If we hope to preserve rainforests, a leading researcher says, new strategies must be adopted to limit the number of roads and reduce their impacts. "

A downloadable US forest map assembled from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data. It is possibly the highest resolution and most detailed view of forest structure and carbon storage ever assembled for any country. "Trees are one of Earth's largest banks for storing the carbon that gets emitted by natural processes and human activities. Forests cover about 30 percent of the planet's surface, and as much as 45 percent of the carbon stored on land is tied up in forests."

"Merlin will be a new kind of bird identification tool-one that combines artificial intelligence with input from real-life bird watchers to produce an online "wizard" that helps people ID birds quickly and connects them to more information. To build Merlin, we need to know how thousands of people remember and describe birds. You can help us by playing games that gather the information to help Merlin understand what bird watchers see. The more you play, the more you'll help Merlin become a true bird ID wizard."

This blog is by an elementary teacher in Palmer Station, Antarctica to lead educational outreach for a research team that is studying the largest land animal in Antarctica... (which, believe it or not, is a wingless fly!)

"The arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea) makes an incredible migration each year. These small birds travel distances of more than 50000 miles, from pole to pole, crossing through temperate and tropical regions along the way. Carsten Egevang used geo-locator tags to track ten of these terns, and he shares their story with us in this tour."