The USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN) supports educational, research-based, and/or management driven partners in collecting, storing, and providing tools to analyze phenological data. The data are collected via the Nature’s Notebook (NN) Program and become part of the National Phenology Database (NPDb), now housing over 15 million observational records. These data are freely available to anyone interested in learning about species response to regional weather or climatic change.
Higher education faculty wish to engage students with real-world datasets to answer scientific questions. The NPDb is a powerful resource for teaching basic data analysis methods, and also connects to phenological patterns and standardized data collection.
While the USA-NPN has many resources available for using the data tools, it lacks specific guidance documents for faculty use in courses where learning outcomes are designed for exploring data. The USA-NPN should have materials available for teaching how to use data tools for understanding trends through time and engaging students/participants in the scientific process.
Faculty working with college students, graduate students, field researchers, and USA-NPN’s National Coordinating Office staff are co-creating curriculum and an implementation guide for using the data tools for teaching ecological concepts like pollinator/flower mismatches and invasive species.
Results/Conclusions
Co-created deliverables include a step-by-step guide, divided into lesson-based modules, for data exploration and reporting. Pre- and post- experience materials are included to measure student knowledge gain. The guide will also be aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards for use in secondary classrooms.
The first draft of the guide was piloted in Fall 2018 in an introductory ecology lab at the University of Minnesota - Duluth (BIOL 2802) with 65 students and 3 instructors, including enough materials for two learning hours of activities. Participating students reported gains in understanding large datasets and interpretation, and feeling empowered as contributors using citizen science data.
The collaboration team hopes to assist faculty in understanding and interpreting phenology data, empowering the public to participate meaningfully in climate science and solutions. By the end of summer 2019 the pilot draft will be used to train citizen scientists and interns to contribute to the Earthwise Aware annual report. Additionally, the team hopes to promote citizen science and further its role in science and policy domains, in our communities and societies at large.