Director of Outreach & Education Harvard Forest, United States
Abstract: The timing of phenological events such as leaf out and senescence greatly influence an ecosystem’s carbon, hydrologic, and nutrient cycling. The PhenoCam Network, established in 2007, is a network of over 700 high resolution webcams that provide automated, near-surface remote sensing of canopy phenology across the United States and Canada. These cameras provide daily images that are analyzed for level of greenness, with automated graphs indicating the amount of green foliage present. The resulting data sets can be analyzed to characterize climate variability and the long term effects of climate change on phenology. These images and data sets are valuable teaching tools for educating grades 4-12 students about the science of phenology and climate change using genuine data.
Our educational work for the project began in 2011 by installing five PhenoCams at school sites in Massachusetts and supporting teachers as they developed related curricula to use with their students. The resulting localized success encouraged us to expand across geographies, seeking to build a more permanent cross-site peer network for using the PhenoCam in the classroom. As part of the broader impacts for an NSF macrosystems grant, the PhenoCam education team designed and facilitated a series of workshops for a geographically diverse group of educators throughout the 2021-2022 school year. Workshops, which were recorded and are publicly available, include an overview of the PhenCam and its educational applications, and a hands-on element to guide teachers in understanding the images and graphs generated by their PhenoCam sites of interest both near and far. We supported the teachers as they developed instructional units that were appropriate for their grade level and school district standards. Teachers submitted lesson plans based on data visualization and the science of phenology, along with examples of student work. We hosted a share out in the spring and teachers provided feedback. During the 2022 and 2023 school year we continued to offer support to the participants. Based on the success of these teacher workshops and the value of using real data to teach important scientific concepts, we conclude that our project advanced the goals of STEM education in these school districts and introduced the science of Phenology as a dynamic way to teach data visualization and climate change both locally and comparatively across biomes.
