Applying Climate Change to Google Earth

A multi-media collaborative effort is underway to apply environmental datasets to Google Earth to illustrate climatic changes and the associated response of ecological systems. Visualized datasets will explore both ecological and weather variables. They will be displayed in both time and space. More importantly, this effort will help individuals explore how their local environment is changing, and make comparisons to global changes. Examples will be shown.

The project will provide an ongoing opportunity for schools to contribute observations (empirical data, gigapan photography, and impressions) to emerging place-based datasets, thus creating citizen scientists who are tracking their local environment and displaying that data publicly on Google Earth. This will afford the chance for students to work with Google tools and to see how their results compare across communities and across time periods. Classrooms will share data, images, and stories with other schools using social media. The project aims to be informative to the public and educational to students, helping them to see and track connections between climate, weather, and ecology in their local regions.