Improving K–12 Instruction of Coastal Climatology and Tree-Ring Science with the Louisiana Sea Grant

Climate and tree-ring science have been added to the repertoire of five classrooms throughout south Louisiana since August 2018. Louisiana Sea Grant, pairing with investigators and students from Louisiana State University (LSU) and the LSU Coastal Roots program allowed participants to learn about, and participate in, active research. These citizen scientists learned about the local South Louisiana environment by experiencing college-level classroom instruction, field work involving coring trees and recording data, and discussing results with expert scientists. This presentation describes the process of involving the participants and some best practices learned. In addition, results from the tree cores throughout south Louisiana yielded promising results for future environment-tree growth analyses. At BREC’s Doyle’s Bayou park, various oak tree species show substantial growth declines following the three largest hurricanes in the last three decades: Hurricanes Andrew (1992), Katrina (2005), and Gustav (2008). Cypress trees growing along the shorelines at Lake Pontchartrain at Fontainebleau State Park show an unusual pattern of growth: they are quite susceptible to summer drought only. Finally, since the LSU Coastal Roots program’s primary goal is to plant trees in places where they can sustain the local environment in the long term, we found that pine trees at BREC’s Blackwater Conservation Area grew healthily in the past three decades. This information was shared with the student and teacher participants in the project and a compendium of information was included for future use. Success in student understanding of the material will also be presented in this talk.