Abstract

A PicturePost is an easy-to-use and inexpensive tool for students and citizens to monitor change-over-time in their local environment. It provides a platform for repeatedly taking digital photographs as a standardized set of images of the landscape, which then can be shared over the Internet. This simple concept has generated considerable excitement among formal and informal educators, citizen groups, government agencies and researchers. Many have recognized its potential for providing a wealth of information and data to monitor changing environmental conditions, which is important for a society grappling with the effects of climate change. PicturePost was an original concept developed for our NASA REASoN project Measuring Vegetation Health (MVH), which is in its fifth and final year. As a direct outgrowth and an enhancement of MVH, this proposal will extend the PicturePost concept and leverage MVH tools to create the Digital Earth Watch (DEW). The goals of DEW are to (1) create a network of teachers, informal educators, non-profit organizations and community groups that install PicturePosts and regularly monitor and share their data and findings, (2) to interpret and evaluate this data, and (3) disseminate information about DEW to formal and informal science educators through the Internet and at state and national science teacher meetings, workshops, national conventions, local fairs and other community-based events.


Rationale

There is a growing awareness among the public that climate change has and will continue to have far-reaching effects. People often feel confused about what is happening and powerless to make informed decisions based on faulty information and misconceptions (Kuhlmeier et al 1999). Young people are especially vulnerable. Educators are under pressure both to teach and reassure students about future climate change. At the same time, there is a wealth of satellite imagery covering the entire planet that displays its great diversity of landscapes and flora and clearly shows change-over-time at local, regional and global scales. Satellite imagery has not been easily accessible to the public, nor do many people know what they are looking at, much less understand how to compare a satellite scene to what they see in their local environment. The DEW project addresses these concerns and the knowledge gap by involving individuals, schools and organizations in a systematic monitoring project of their local environment through the use of PicturePost, an example of “place-based education” (Sobel 2004).


Technology continues to advance at a rapid pace allowing anyone to communicate with virtually anyone else over the world-wide-web. Recent advances in Internet capabilities have created a social-networking environment that is unprecedented. Internet technology has played a role in improving public access to scientific research data and information, but for the most part, using the Internet to build communities around science-based social issues has not been explored. DEW will take the next logical step to create an Internet-based network where participants can share their photos, contribute to a national database, develop spatial reasoning (NRC 2006), learn about remote sensing, compare photos with satellite images, share their own applications and communicate with others regarding environmental issues and environmental monitoring (North American Association for Environmental Ed 2004). During the program we will evaluate the effectiveness of online communities for science-based social networking and for engaging the public in making real contributions towards improving their actual communities.


The goals of Measuring Vegetation Health were to teach people how to examine plants using simple tools, to be able to read their signs of an unhealthy environment and be able to identify the causes of the problems. Digital Earth Watch extends these goals by offering people the means to share their data, study and analyze their own findings and contribute towards improving their own communities. Plants are an obvious choice for monitoring environmental change. They are like "green canaries"— if they die, then other organisms will likely follow. Plant health and the timing of phenological events are topics of active research and concern across the globe, and provide excellent topics for outdoor activities and place-based learning (Palmberg & Kuru 2000). Photographs from PicturePosts are a rich resource to help people learn about their environment while also providing valuable data to the scientific community.


A national or even global network of PicturePosts can contribute substantially to global change research. It is increasingly recognized that large-scale networks of integrated observations of phenological and other time-series observations are critical for scientists to fully understand local, regional and global impacts of climate change (Betancourt 2005). A PicturePost network made up of students involved in community service learning (Terry & Bohnenberg 2003), citizens, nature centers, researchers, and government agencies can work together to offer solutions to pressing problems associated with climate change. DEW will take citizen science to a new level by empowering the public to observe and document changes in their local environment that are of the most interest to them, to understand what they see in the context of global climate change, and to participate in a social network over the Internet that fosters sharing and the communication and knowledge that leads to action.


Goals and Objectives

The main goal of DEW is to advance NASA’s educational mission by creating a vibrant collaborative learning environment for sharing information and knowledge that is critical for improving the scientific literacy of the public and enhancing STEM education, particularly in regards to climate change. The educational goals of this project are for students, individuals and organizations to:

In service of the above goals, we propose a program to:


Audience

PicturePost has the potential to reach a wide audience. Any interested individual or group can easily install a post and upload their photos to the website. However, we plan to grow the PicturePost network primarily by promoting DEW to nature centers, science centers, arboreta and botanical gardens as an activity for their visitors and for their outreach to middle and high school teachers and students. This audience is generally aware of climate change. Most know that there has been a degradation of the environment. However, very few can pinpoint problems on the ground in their own local neighborhoods. DEW will help centers install a PicturePost and provide tools, training and teacher materials to help them engage school groups and visitors in using a PicturePost to inquire into change in their local area and to share their photos and activities with others over the web. As people become familiar with how easy it is to use, we expect more individuals and community groups to install and use posts or other platforms for taking photographs repeatedly to make and share their own observations.


Projected Audience Needs

There is a tremendous need for the public to learn about environmental change through personal observations as evidenced by the enthusiastic response to the PicturePost concept. Although PicturePost has not yet been heavily promoted, there are about 25 active PicturePost sites located in 4 states (MA, RI, NC, IL) with more than 8000 photographs collected. The photo library of PicturePost images averages 5000 hits per week. New installations are in the works in ME and NH. If funded, DEW will greatly increase the number of active sites and also support the learning community around PicturePost, which is essential for building the network, sustaining it over the long term, and using it to meaningfully support important research and policy initiatives.


In order to effectively teach science and help students understand the problems around them, schools are looking for projects that can tie into their existing programs and that meet the science standards for their state and national environmental education standards as published by the North American Association for Environmental Education (2004). The successes of programs such as GLOBE and Project Budburst testify to the fact that good programs can bolster and sustain successful science programs. UNH’s own Forest Watch Program has been active for 18 years and continues to grow from its initial six schools. Informal educators are looking for hands-on, outdoor activities to engage the public. DEW offers innovative and high quality resources for both formal and informal education alike.




A sampling of groups already interested in using PicturePosts have supplied letters of support. These letters show the variety of potential PicturePost users and uses: the Seacoast Science Center in NH (W. Lull, Director), Project Budburst (S. Henderson, educator), National Phenology Network (E. Denny, Northeast coordinator) and an individual who designed and now markets the ready-made plastic lumber posts and whose son, an Eagle Scout, is working with his local schools to include PicturePosts in their science classes (D. Cook, VP of Sales and Marketing for Engineered Plastic Systems, LLC).


Relevance

Relevance to NASA’s Educational Goals

The ROSES Research Announcement calls for alignment to NASA’s educational goals with the priorities for NASA’s newly realigned Science Mission Directorate (SMD). These goals include strengthening the future workforce of NASA and the Nation, attracting and retaining students in STEM disciplines, and engaging Americans in NASA’s mission. Our proposal addresses these critical needs by providing resources in the following project categories of the NASA SMD Education Portfolio:



Relevance to NASA’s Education Strategic Framework

DEW is also aligned with NASA’s Education Strategic Framework goals to:

“encourage individuals (as students, educators, parents, civil leaders, etc.) engaged in a NASA educational project in one part of the Education Strategic Framework to connect or move up to activities in another part of Framework.”

Connecting across the Framework, students who take part in hands-on science activities are more likely to seek careers in science or technology (National Research Council 2006, 2007). Young people who use PicturePost at school, on a visit to a nature center or as part of scouting project will become interested in seeking higher educational opportunities in remote sensing, environmental science, engineering or other SMET disciplines that they may not have been aware of otherwise. The online PicturePost community will offer them many opportunities for inquiry and for creating their own online analysis techniques and applications, which may lead to new technology advances. Many successful careers in technology began as student projects that led to Internet applications like Mosaic, Google or Facebook, that have transformed communication and the very definition of community. Educators who are trained to teach DEW will be confident in using DEW concepts and tools in service to their own communities, outside of their role as educators.

Resources

The MVH Grant was a successful collaboration in the development and field-testing of innovative tools, and the DEW project is intended to address the broad dissemination of these processes and products. The software and educational tools were tested in NASA grant-sponsored workshops between 2004-2008, and are now available through the MVH web site. (URLs for each resource are listed at the end of the document.) DEW will leverage the following resources developed for MVH:


T

he PicturePost. The PicturePost is simply an octagon placed in the center of a round disk and secured to a post anchored in the ground or onto a building. Using the post to position the camera, the complete landscape may be photographed in less than a minute as a series of 8 photographs + 1 looking up. Laminated instructions are posted for people to read or photograph for later reading when preparing their pictures. The post includes location name, post number, latitude and longitude. PicturePosts may be built from scratch or versions made of recycled plastic lumber can be purchased through the website.



Learning Activities. Learning activities aimed at communicating basic properties of the electromagnetic spectrum through measuring the emission, transmission, and reflection of light are available from the MVH website. Activities use simple, inexpensive equipment, LEDs and a voltmeter, and introduce concepts about plant types (broadleaf vs. conifer) and plant health. Materials on using digital cameras introduce concepts of studying plant growth and morphology through the taking of repeated pictures at the same location or monitoring plant health by using filters that let specific bandwidths of light through. These concepts and tools are essential to understanding vegetation dynamics and climate change. DEW educators will be trained in using these materials for their PicturePost activities and lessons.



Software programs: Color Basics, Digital Image Basics, and Analyzing Digital Images. Freely available software programs currently distributed via the MVH web site were developed for students to explore fundamental concepts of digital images including resolution, pixels, and mapping of light measurements to display colors. These programs support the hands-on activities so students develop concrete understanding of color, light, and imagery (Beaudry 2006, Beaudry & Wilson 2008 and in review). Analyzing Digital Images is a tool to study environmental change and lends itself well for inquiry using PicturePost photos. For example, students can take measurements from repeated pictures of a single leaf or a bud as it opens over time, changes in the landscape photographed from a PicturePost, and compare them with time-series of satellite images for their location. Software programs are written in RealBasic and are easy to download and install for both PCs and Macintosh computers.



E
OS-WEBSTER. A WEB-based System for Terrestrial Ecosystem Research, EOS-WEBSTER, is the digital library for Earth system science data at UNH. It has served over 800,000 local, regional, and global Earth System Science data sets over the web. EOS-WEBSTER began in 1998 with an ESIP Type II grant from NASA. The system was designed for users to create custom data sets on-the-fly by subsetting large raster data sets in time and space. This capability will be used for DEW to create MODIS image subsets in areas where PicturePosts are located. EOS-WEBSTER is also the engine behind the Landsat Clic ‘n Pic application, which was developed for MVH to provide Landsat data.




Landsat Clic ‘n Pic. The Clic ‘n Pic is an interface that provides easy access to full Landsat images or 15 x 15 km image subsets. Users click on a map or type a path and row, a latitude/longitude pair, or a city and state of interest. Landsat images in the archive (from 1990s or 2000 era) that overlay the location of interest are highlighted and made available for subsetting or download. The Clic ‘n Pic was created for MVH in response to teacher needs for an easy way to get and use Landsat data.




Dedicated PicturePost Website. The PicturePost library currently resides on a commercial website, SmugMug. At the time the site was chosen, it was one of very few that provided capabilities for uploading and sharing photo galleries at a reasonable cost. We surveyed

users who reported that the website is the single largest obstacle for them because it is tricky and time-consuming to upload photos. The site is more about photography than about sharing science discoveries, making it difficult for users to do much beyond viewing and selecting photographs to download. In the spring of 2008, NASA provided us additional funds to build and host a dedicated PicturePost website. The website is in development and will be operational in the fall of 2008. It will improve the online experiences of PicturePost users by addressing the difficulties in using Smugmug, but will not fully encompass the social-networking capabilities or redesign of the MVH website as described in this proposal.


Evaluation Results from MVH

The program evaluation of the first four years of the MVH grant (2004-2008) provided information about: 1) the alignment of MVH tools, products and resources with state standards, 2) interest and readiness of teachers to use MVH tools and resources, 3) use of online tools for professional development, 4) the utility of an integrated web site for organization of MVH tools, products, and resources, and 5) formal and informal science education partnerships.


Environmental monitoring and environmental science are identified in state standards, but these standards are likely to become a greater part of curriculum in the future. Based on our evaluation of MVH we found that teachers’ confidence in environmental monitoring is related to a number of factors: the alignment of activities to state standards, accessibility and ease of use of environmental monitoring tools, and ongoing professional development for these tools. One of the content standards to which PicturePost aligns is the study of ecosystems, and what factors create stability and change.


Based on surveys, middle and high school teachers were familiar with the use of digital cameras in the classroom, but were less familiar with the concept of using light and color for environmental monitoring. The MVH evaluators created an innovative online survey for workshop participants to provide timely feedback on new content and MVH tools and resources. Feedback helped create and revise MVH tools like the Landsat Clic ‘n Pic, PicturePost, and the image analysis software trio Color Basics, Image Basics, and Image Analysis that were developed to integrate remote sensing and satellite imagery with direct observations of local environments by citizens and students. Middle and high school teachers were able to learn these tools and have reported numerous classroom applications for inquiry that are accessible to middle and high school students for monitoring environmental change.


PicturePost was an original concept and technology developed by scientists and educators as part of the MVH grant, and the entire activity involving PicturePost needs to be thoroughly field tested with informal and formal science organizations. For example, one of the MVH partners, Forest Watch is a school-university research partnership to study the impact of ozone on the growth of white pine. With established research protocols for middle and high school students to study white pines, each school is responsible for careful data collection on a 30-meter square plot, which happens to correspond with the size of one pixel on a Landsat satellite image. Currently there are over seventy schools in the New England states and beyond, each of them potential users of PicturePost for digital data collection on their Forest Watch plot. Similar field data collection is part of the UNH-led GLOBE Carbon Cycle project and teachers who piloted the program in NH last fall have expressed interest in using PicturePost in their field plots.


A key finding of the MVH grant is that a web site could be developed for storage and dissemination of such a diverse array of materials and resources. The MVH web site serves as a repository for relevant resources and the tools created for the grant including: 1) the image analysis software, 2) Landsat Clic ‘n Pic with the new subsetter, and 3) PicturePost. However, the collection of resources and lessons has grown beyond the scope of the website so that a substantial revision to the site is needed to accommodate specific, emerging technologies like the PicturePost and to support communication across the virtual community. The work proposed here represents the opportunity to develop research protocols and recruit citizens as well as educators that were the focus of MVH, with a wide range of experience in environmental monitoring. The MVH project was a major collaboration between informal and formal science organizations across the USA; DEW will be most successful if local informal and formal organizations can collaborate to support environmental monitoring using PicturePost.


Plan of Work

Action Plan 1: DEW training workshops and PicturePost installations for formal and informal educators and citizen scientists.

In the first year of the project, we will develop models for DEW training workshops. The formal education model must be standards-based public education whereas the informal and citizen scientist models will have to meet the needs for participants to gain not only an understanding of using PicturePost for environmental monitoring, but also concrete examples of investigations and analysis that they can apply to their own interests. Pilot workshops will be carried out and evaluated and then refined in Years 2 and 3.


Two-day workshops will consist of 14 hours of contact time that can be organized as face-to-face, synchronous online, or asynchronous online professional development. The goals of the workshop are as follows:



With this grant, we have a goal to establish 100 new PicturePost sites nationally. It is critical that, for their efforts to be valuable, participants understand what should be collected and for what purpose. Lovett et al. (2007) list a series of important considerations for monitoring that apply equally to agencies or citizens and will form the basis of our programs:



Action Plan 2: Collect and organize satellite imagery into EOS-WEBSTER.

To establish easy access to satellite imagery for users, EOS-WEBSTER will accumulate and manage satellite imagery throughout the grant and beyond. With the recent release of Landsat imagery, sequential and regional series of images will be collected and coupled with MODIS and where available, IKONOS images, to give participants a better understanding of “small to large” in terms of detail. EOS-WEBSTER will collect Landsat imagery in addition to the full US coverage data already in-house and make the images accessible through the Landsat Clic ‘n Pic. The collection includes scenes taken around 1990 and 2000, providing a 10-year interval to observe change-over-time. It will be augmented with later images to provide an additional snapshot in time. We will also collect MODIS images for the US and process them into regional mosaics that can be subsetted. MODIS products of interest include the MOD/MYD09A1 8-day surface reflectance data, which we have been archiving since 2002, and the MOD/MYD13Q1 16-day vegetation indices that will be a new addition to the archive.


EOS-WEBSTER will make use of its capability to create image subsets on-the-fly in both time and space to facilitate easy use of MODIS data. Just as the Landsat Clic ‘n Pic was developed as a specialized interface for the collection of Landsat data, an important effort for DEW will be to create a specialized interface for MODIS data products. The system will be refined to generate true and false color MODIS images from the MOD/MYD09A1 products. Users will have the choice to select their area and time period of interest from a map. Products will include images that can be viewed or downloaded and analyzed in an image processing software like our own Analyzing Digital Images.


Action Plan 3: Familiarize users with NASA satellite imagery and remote sensing of the environment through PicturePost activities.

A goal of DEW is to enhance student and citizen-based environmental monitoring by making people comfortable with remotely-sensed data, in particular, satellite imagery. Workshop participants will use the web browser to view Landsat and MODIS images side-by-side along with PicturePost photographs and will analyze images with our Analyzing Digital Images software. We will evaluate what materials and tools are needed for participants to make the connection between local conditions and regional or global land use and land cover and how they use the tools for their own inquiries. We will also explore ways for visitors at science centers to view satellite imagery as part of their PicturePost experience. This may include placing laminated packets of annotated images at the post or, if the science center has good Internet capability and a monitor, they can build a custom web page for their center that accesses the EOS-WEBSTER image archive automatically through web service protocols.


Action Plan 4: Design and implement features for the online PicturePost community.

The proposed PicturePost network is a great tool for collecting imagery in a reliable, repeatable and geo-referenced manner at several locations over many seasons and many years. Images taken at each post will be of great usefulness as documentation of the variability of earthly cycles, especially when correlated to satellite imagery and compared over time and across space.


We envision that PicturePost photos will be collected by volunteers and so, are aware of the many difficulties in sustaining the quality and quantity of data collected by grass-roots efforts. Whereas it is becoming more-and-more likely that a casual visitor who stumbles upon a PicturePost would be equipped at least with a camera-phone, and while it may be plausible that at least some of these visitors may be intrigued enough to actually take a series of photos, it is unclear what percentage of these picture-takers actually would go on to complete the “observation” and submit the photos through the existing web site. Even schools and informal science venues, having demonstrated the strongest interest in the PicturePost network, could benefit from an improved system for uploading, analyzing and sharing PicturePost photos, and for networking with other like-minded schools or groups across the nation.


We propose a suite of enhancements to the PicturePost website to make it as easy and attractive as possible to be a contributor to local, regional and global monitoring efforts.

The goals of this aspect of the project are:


  1. To design and implement a “crowdsourcing” application to collect, organize, analyze and share PicturePost submissions.

  2. To allow users to “design” their own window into the DEW project, by composing their own web pages.

  3. To visualize PicturePost data in intriguing and sophisticated ways.

  4. To provide a set of social networking services that will foster interaction with the global data repository and with other users across the globe.

  5. To implement a series of electronic alert and reminder systems to invite users to collect data at crucial times of the year.

  6. To experiment with alternative observation methods that do not require a physical picturepost (the “virtual” picturepost).

  7. To allow others to contribute new online analytical or visualization functions and share them with the community.


In general, our system will exploit the most successful techniques of the so-called Web 2.0 universe, whereby information is gathered and shared very interactively, at times almost unwittingly, such as when we strengthen the page rank of a web page in Google simply by clicking on a link to it. Thus, we plan to explore blog-like or wiki-like interfaces, using gadgets (as in iGoogle) or widgets (as in Yahoo) to allow the user to assemble their own personal web page that filters through only the aspects of interest to the users, linking them to reports from faraway or nearby places, which may share similarities or simply be of interest to them. Our application will employ crowdsourcing, which is a term coined for Web 2.0 that refers to information that is freely generated by “the general public” (the crowd) and not by a specific organization, as is done in traditional outsourcing. The best-known example of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia. In general, all citizen science programs are a form of crowdsourcing, although the term is typically applied only to web-based systems.


These proposed Web 2.0 tools will be based on City Lab’s LOUIS (Local Online Urban Information System), server-side web-services platform, currently under development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. At the moment, LOUIS consists of low-level functions (APIs – Application Programming Interface) that can be accessed as web services from any web application. LOUIS services will allow the uploading of PicturePost photos, their retrieval, tagging, analysis, comparison, and sharing.


A separate client application will be created to allow the flexible visualization of data extracted from Digital Earth Watch servers via LOUIS services. Eventually, all members of the DEW community will have the ability to develop their own web applications to visualize the DEW data through the LOUIS APIs. As is necessary with all interactive web applications, security and appropriateness of the user contributions will be incorporated into all of our web functions.


Action Plan 5: Coordinate with national monitoring networks.

We will work with Project Budburst and the National Phenology Network towards building connections between their observations and photographs in the PicturePost library. The Web 2.0 enhancements to the DEW website will go a long way towards making such connections easy and customizable by users. Both programs are interested in using photographs to validate phenological observations of their participants (letters Henderson, Denny). If feasible, we will coordinate workshops with those carried out by both groups, by either presenting PicturePost at their workshops or inviting representatives from their programs to our workshops.


Dissemination and Sustainability

DEW will be disseminated through local organizations such as museums and other informal education venues, as well as through regional and national meetings of science educators. The website will be promoted through web links, blogs and e-mail listservers for educators, government agencies, citizen groups, etc. Presentations at NSTA annual conferences and articles submitted to national educational and environmental journals will be used as the primary ways to inform teachers about this program. Partnerships with local organizations as well as museums will help to grow the network and to create a sustainable program that can stand on its own.


With a dedicated network of PicturePosts, a reliable and accessible photo library and a permanent website established, the project will be easily sustainable. A priority will be the placement of PicturePosts at non-profit organizations such as Audubon and at science centers with a strong reputation for environmental initiatives such as natural history museums. These institutions are well poised to be able to maintain a presence as contributors to the PicturePost database and a source of continued teacher training, citizen science initiatives, and published results of PicturePost investigations. The research community will help sustain the network as well. University graduate and undergraduate students can be engaged to field check results and integrate their research with the collected data. Results will be shared with electronic newsletters, local newspapers and TV weather broadcasters, thereby providing a public service at the same time keeping up interest in the program. The virtual community will be self-sustaining as long as there are pressing environmental issues and citizens willing to take an active role in problem solving.


We will explore sponsorship and maintenance of posts not on the grounds of nature centers or arboreta by groups such as the Appalachian Mountain Club, Geocaching, or even corporations who may wish to sponsor a post as part of their community service program. Technology companies may want to test more advanced technology such as instant uploading of photos or viewing the most up-to-date satellite image using a cell phone, and be willing to sponsor a post for that purpose. As groups make commitments to be responsible for the upkeep of PicturePosts, the network will flourish and reach into remote areas.


Evaluation

The purpose of the evaluation is to measure key ROSES SMD E/PO program objectives as shown in the DEW PicturePost Evaluation Plan (see table below). The evaluation will consist of both formative and summative components. For example, formative evaluation will be used to provide feedback to the look and feel of the web site and the educational materials in particular. Summative evaluation will be conducted at the end of each year and at the conclusion of the program.


DEW and PicturePost Evaluation Plan

Objectives

Formative

Summative

Integrate PicturePost into a network.

Identification of individuals and organizations involved in the PicturePost networks.

Growth of network over time and survey of a sample of users.

Design and publish a DEW PicturePost web site with online networking capabilities.

Design of web site in collaboration with experts and end-users

Collection of data from web site users to include user profiles, surveys of users, and feedback on web site.

Collect and organize new Landsat and MODIS imagery for PicturePost users.

Identification of new Landsat data sets and integration into existing tools like Clic ‘n Pic.

Collection of data on the users and uses of Landsat and MODIS data.

Plan and produce educational materials for informal and formal education.

Evaluation of educational materials (e.g., web-based tools and multimedia) according to universal design principles.

Evaluation of the users in a sample of formal and informal organizations using both quantitative (survey) and qualitative (interviews, observations, and artifacts) methods.

Research both types of partnerships: community to school, and school to community.

Develop criteria and review DEW participants to identify both types of partnerships; check with school and community participants.

Sample from both types of partnerships for in-depth case studies using both quantitative and qualitative methods.



Management Plan

At the beginning of each year, the development team will meet for a 2 to 3-day working meeting to plan, review, and organize for the upcoming year. The partners are all close enough to allow for convenient daylong meetings during the year. The majority of communications will take place through e-mail, telephone and Skype. Annette Schloss is responsible for the overall organization of the project, the collection and distribution of satellite data on UNH’s EOS-WEBSTER. Fabio Carrera is responsible for the development and implementation of the web applications. Schloss and Carrera will coordinate the technology development efforts between UNH and WPI. Brian Rogan and Jeff Beaudry will make contacts with potential PicturePost user groups, organize and run teacher workshops and prepare curriculum and informal science education materials, and will distribute the 100 posts. John Pickle will help with development and review of materials and in updating the MVH software as needed. Barry Rock, serving as science advisor (at no cost to the project), will contribute to and review materials and activities throughout the project, and participate in virtual events such as a videoconferences during the workshops. Jeff Beaudry is responsible for developing, organizing and completing project evaluations.


Project Milestones

Milestone

Year 1

Year 2

Year 3

Accumulate and Maintain Landsat Data

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Accumulate and Process MODIS data

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Create Activities and Guides

x

x

x

x









Workshops and Pilot Test DEW and PicturePost Activities



x

x

x








DEW Training Workshops






x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Revise Guides





x

x

x






Install PicturePosts nationally




x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x














Develop and test low-level APIs (web services) on the DEW server; develop prototype client

x

x

x

x









Develop basic gadgets and create a prototype web application that uses such gadgets in composing personalized web pages; Make website public





x

x

x

x





Develop advanced visualization, analysis, sharing, comparing, alert and reminder functions (gadgets) for the web application









x

x

x

x

Distribute Nationally to formal, informal & community-based science educators









x

x

x

x

Formative Evaluation Report


x


x


x


x


x



Final, Summative Report




x




x




x



DEW Personnel

Dr. Annette Schloss has been project manager of the EOS-WEBSTER digital library for the past ten years, managing all aspects of the project including supervising the technical teams, developing the website look and feel and collecting new datasets. EOS-WEBSTER continues to evolve to keep abreast of interoperability standards and technical advances. Prior to taking on the WEBSTER project, she co-authored several journal articles on global biogeochemical cycles and modeling. She is serving as technical editor for the EPA-funded “Remote Sensing Methods For Lake Management: A Guide for Resource Managers and Decisionmakers”, which will be released this year. She participates in several NASA and NSF-funded education projects including Measuring Vegetation Health (MVH), the GLOBE project Exploring Ecosystems and the Atmosphere in the K-12 Classroom: A Plan to Integrate NASA Carbon Cycle Science with GLOBE, and the Earth Exploration Toolbook.


Dr. Jeffrey Beaudry is Associate Professor in Educational Leadership at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to his doctoral degree he has a degree in medical-scientific photography and over five years experience as a medical-scientific photographer. He has extensive background as a program evaluator with skills in statistical analysis and qualitative research. He has worked on numerous projects in science, mathematics and technology with the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (1992-1994), Corvallis (Oregon) School District (1994-1995), and the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance (1996-2000), and Measuring Vegetation Health (MVH). His MVH contributions include a manuscript, Concept Mapping and Formative Assessment: Elements Supporting Literacy and Learning, in review at the international Handbook for Research on Concept Mapping and Collaborative Research, and the development of a system for online, formative feedback by participants in workshops. Dr. Beaudry now teaches courses online and in blended media formats with webinars and video networks. He is a contributing faculty member to the Center for Technology Education and Learning (CTEL) at USM, and has produced numerous Web 2.0 multimedia, like podcasts and Camtasia recordings. With over twenty professional publications many on technology, literacy, and science and mathematics achievement, Dr, Beaudry continues to explore issues relating to visual learning, formative assessment and literacy.


Dr. Fabio Carrera is a full time member of the faculty of the Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), where he is also the director of the Venice and Boston Project Centers, as well as the founder and director of City Lab, an interdisciplinary research laboratory dedicated to Urban Technology and Information Systems. In addition to a number of scientific papers, he has been featured in the National Geographic magazine, MIT’s Technology Review magazine, the Smithsonian magazine, Wired, New Scientist and Science. He was also featured on BBC Radio and in a National Geographic video completely dedicated to his work in his hometown of Venice, Italy. Ever since he earned his Ph.D. degree in Urban Information Systems and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a dissertation entitled “City Knowledge: an emergent information infrastructure for sustainable urban maintenance, management and planning”, Fabio’s main research focus has been on emergent systems and in particular on the gradual and systematic accumulation of urban and environmental information for the creation of comprehensive municipal information infrastructures that will reliably and continually support maintenance, management and planning operations, as well as education and outreach. He is currently working on the release of twenty years of detailed geospatial data collected by over 450 WPI students who produced 120 research projects in Venice since 1988.


Mr. John Pickle is trained as a geologist, meteorologist, and remote sensing scientist. While working at the Museum of Science of Boston, he was the Principal Investigator of NASA REASoN grant, Measuring Vegetation Health. Working with members of his local park to utilize the MVH ideas, he developed the PicturePost. He also wrote the MVH software for the project. After leaving the Museum, he developed educational software and curricula for a number of clients, and he became a science teacher at Concord Academy, Concord, MA. He currently teaches physics, geology, meteorology, and oceanography. He will act as an advisor for the PicturePost project and revise the software programs to support the development of the project.


Dr. Barry Rock is professor in the Natural Resources Department at UNH. His research and publications have focused on remote sensing of vegetation, specifically on basic and applied research dealing with biophysical properties (pigment concentrations, anatomical characteristics, and moisture conditions) of leaves and their influence on reflectance features that may be remotely detected. He has been involved in vegetation discrimination and mapping of deciduous forest species in the eastern United States, spectral characterization and mapping of arid and semi-arid vegetation in the western United States, as well as assessment of state-of-health in coniferous vegetation using remotely sensed data. He is collaborating on the Quantifying Leaf Chlorophyll Content, Light Absorption by Chlorophyll and Gross Primary Production of Forests (2008-2010) project with Dr. Xiangming Xiao, to develop inexpensive but quantifiable field tools such as digital cameras outfitted with specific filters as a means of acquiring digital photos for estimating chlorophyll content at canopy level. He is the founder and director of the Forest Watch Program, one of the first and most successful programs for students to do meaningful scientific research, by collecting data on health of white pine trees, which are indicators of ozone pollution. Forest Watch is a Measuring Vegetation Health partner program.


Mr. Brian Rogan is currently a curriculum developer and teacher educator at the Museum of Science in Boston, MA. He has been, most recently, the Principal Investigator of the NASA REASoN grant, Measuring Vegetation Health, which has developed a number of teacher tools and investigations for connecting remote sensing to ground truthing and citizen-science initiatives. Prior to his work at the museum, he has over 25 years teaching and administration experience in K-12 education. He has conducted numerous teacher training workshops in multiple science content areas.


Related URLs

EOS-WEBSTER, a digital library of Earth Science data at the University of New Hampshire, http://eos-webster.sr.unh.edu

Landsat Clic ‘n Pic, an easy interface into Landsat scenes developed for MVH, http://mvh.sr.unh.edu/Landsat

Measuring Vegetation Health, http://mvh.sr.unh.edu

Smugmug, the current home of the PicturePost photo library, http://picturepost.smugmug.com

Engineered Plastic Systems, LLC, https://omega.mc.net/epsplasticlumber.com/orderform_recap.php.

City Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, http://ece.wpi.edu/CityLab/City_Lab.html