Floating Forests

Kelp forests are one of the most biodiverse habitats on Earth. Every nook and cranny is jam-packed with life! This citizen science project wants to understand more about how kelp forests grow and change over time. Floating Forests needs your help to trace patches of kelp from pictures taken from space. Computers are not up to the task – humans can do a far more accurate job helping to process the mountain of data they have.

URL: www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/floating-forests

Reach: Worldwide

Nature of science focus: Online citizen science (OCS) projects can be used to develop any of the Nature of Science (NoS) substrands. Identify aspects of NoS that your students need to get better at or understand more fully and then frame your unit to be very clear about these things when you do them.

Science capability focus: Gather and interpret data, Engage with science

Science focus: Environmental science, ecology – ocean species, coastal ecosystems

Some suggested science concepts:

• Seaweed diversity.
• Seaweed as primary produce.
• The role of seaweed in ocean food webs.
• The impacts of climate change on kelp.
• Living things depend on other living and non-living things for survival.
• Importance of foundation species in ecosystems.

Many concepts could be learned – focusing on a few can often be more powerful. Develop your learning outcomes and success criteria from these concepts as well as the Nature of Science strand and the science capabilities.

Some examples of learning outcomes:

Students can:

• understand the importance of satellite observations and the limitations of this technology
• understand the importance of kelp as a critical organism in marine ecosystems
• interpret images through careful observation
• understand the value of taking action via a citizen science project.

About Floating Forests

This project is funded by NASA and uses photographs taken from the Landsat series of satellites.

The need for citizen scientist help came when scientists discovered that Landsat was not designed to see kelp and that no image classification software was able to identify kelp within the thousands of images that Floating Forests had. Kelp’s reflectance signature (the colour of light that it reflects) is just at the edge of the camera’s detection abilities. Because of this, kelp and something as simple as the glint of sun off a wave look the same to a computer, but to a person, the shapes and patterns of kelp forests are clearly different. In this instance humans can do a far more accurate job than a computer of tracing patches of kelp.

As with other Zooniverse projects, this project offers students a unique opportunity to explore real scientific data while making a contribution to cutting-edge research. It is also possible to connect to the scientists through the blog and the forum (under the ‘talk’ tab). Accessibility to experts has been shown to be a powerful connection and motivator with students.

Kelp

Giant kelp forests are one of the most exciting ecosystems on Earth! Kelp is called a foundation species. In ecosystems where kelp is present (roughly 25% of the world’s coastlines), it forms the foundation for the entire ecosystem. Kelp provides food for all manner of herbivores such as tiny shrimp, sea urchins and a wide variety of fish.

Activities using Floating Forests

Zooniverse offers some free lab activities, including GEO/BIO/EVS 101 with Floating Forests that supports this project. The activity has three sections: climate change background, an introduction to Floating Forests and case studies that present data generated by citizen scientists on Floating Forests in the context of climate change.

Although the activity encourages learning about climate change and kelp, the main goal is to foster scientific self-efficacy, data literacy and self-confidence that will allow participants to be more self-sufficient with regard to scientific topics in our modern lives. Information is presented in several ways including text, graphs, maps and hypothetical debates.

This activity was initially developed for undergraduates in general education science courses, but it could be easily adapted for secondary school students.