The MBARI EARTH workshop is unique in many ways. First, there are lots of returning teachers who are completely invested in the purpose and who are actively involved in using, supporting and helping build the ‘program’. The premise of the workshop is to integrate teachers and scientists – to have scientists share their research and data with teachers, and in turn, for teachers to figure out how to bring the real time or near real time data to their students. The lessons and ideas that are created by the teachers are not grade level or subject based but open to all, and allow teachers to make modifications and additions based on their community.
Yesterday, the first researcher was Rob Suryan who talked to us about some of his research on seabird oceanography, specifically the short tailed albatross. For me it was a great first talk - I love birds and so was immediately hooked and immediately realizing how little I know about these birds. Working collaboratively with Japanese researchers, they added telemetry to birds and watched their flight patterns over months, and in some cases years. While I could go in to details about how the parent albatross may travel thousands of miles from the nesting ground to go and hunt food (think nesting in Japan and hunting in the Aleutians), and of the additional focus of the research to try and help the species increase in number after it’s population was significantly decreased due to predation by humans, the specific tie in to the workshop was the data that Rob gave us. Using information from the satellite telemetry as well as Google Earth, we were able to track the flight patterns of an adult and juvenile bird, observing differences in their behavior. The photo below shows some of the data points -each red dot is each day. Incredible.
Yesterday, the first researcher was Rob Suryan who talked to us about some of his research on seabird oceanography, specifically the short tailed albatross. For me it was a great first talk - I love birds and so was immediately hooked and immediately realizing how little I know about these birds. Working collaboratively with Japanese researchers, they added telemetry to birds and watched their flight patterns over months, and in some cases years. While I could go in to details about how the parent albatross may travel thousands of miles from the nesting ground to go and hunt food (think nesting in Japan and hunting in the Aleutians), and of the additional focus of the research to try and help the species increase in number after it’s population was significantly decreased due to predation by humans, the specific tie in to the workshop was the data that Rob gave us. Using information from the satellite telemetry as well as Google Earth, we were able to track the flight patterns of an adult and juvenile bird, observing differences in their behavior. The photo below shows some of the data points -each red dot is each day. Incredible.
Today we heard from two other researchers studying diverse marine topics based out of Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and tomorrow, two more, one speaking about the Japanese 2011 tsumami debris, and the other on ocean sound! On Thursday we work together in groups to design lessons that collaborate and emphasize the (near) real time data that we now have access to from these researchers, lessons that we can use in our classroom but that can also become part of the MBARI EARTH collective.