Educational Resources
Below, we provide links to some of the educational resources that have been developed through our collaboration with Project Budburst and the Education and Public Engagement team of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). These are targeted at a K-12 audience but are most appropriate for grades 5 through 9. The lesson plans leverage data exploration and visualization tools that are available on the PhenoCam web page, and engage students in creative exploration of PhenoCam data.
There are numerous other educational resources related to phenology that are available online. These include:
- NEON Education maintains a web page containing links to tutorials focused on phenology and the data skills needed to ask phenology-related questions.
- The Harvard Forest Schoolyard LTER program maintains an extensive set of phenologically-related lesson plans and associated materials for K-12 education.
- Nature’s Notebook, a program of the USA-National Phenology Network, has a large number of educational resources for both K-12 and higher education audiences.
K-12 Lesson plans from the Asombro Institute for Science Education and the USDA Southwest Climate Hub:
Education specialists at the Asombro Institute for Science Education in Las Cruces, NM (a non-profit, education partner of the Jornada LTER site) developed and published two PhenoCam-based lessons through their partnership with the USDA’s Southwest Climate Hub. The high school lesson has students explore the carbon cycle by pairing Phenocam data with nearby atmospheric CO2 monitoring stations (NOAA data) to explain the seasonal sawtooth pattern in CO2 levels. They see that when plants are green and photosynthesizing, CO2 levels drop, and vice versa. You can access the lesson plans through the links below.
Video: Using PhenoCam data and imagery in K-12 STEM education
PhenoCam Basics: What it is, how it works, and tutorial on accessing data and imagery
2020 Harvard Forest Schoolyard LTER Teacher Workshop:
The materials in this section are from a "virtual" PhenoCam Teacher Workshop held on October 15, 2020. The workshop was organized by Pamela Snow from the Harvard Forest Schoolyard LTER Program (see link above). The workshop was recorded and the full video of the workshop along with the autogenerated transcript is online . Slides from the workshop presentations are available below. The PhenoCam Exploration Worksheet from Kate Bennett is available here .
