Going Further

Variations

Investigate forest biodiversity in your area or state.

Other Data

Obtain soil or biophysical region data formatted for GIS applications, and analyze the data within a biodiversity context.

Other Techniques

After completing this activity, take a field trip to a local forest and continue discussion about biodiversity.

Other Tools

Forest Inventory Growth data can be imported into any GIS and most visualization tools such as AEJEE and ArcGIS.

Related Case Studies

Other EET chapters that use My World GIS and/or other GIS software include the following:

How Cities Affect Their Local Climate—Explore the urban heat island effect using student collected surface temperature data. Subset large datasets, buffer others, examine spatial relationships, and gather statistics to investigate temperature differences in urban and rural school sites.

Detecting El Nino in Sea Surface Temperature Data—Create and analyze fifteen years of average SST maps to find El Niño and La Niño events.

Evidence for Plate Tectonics—Identify relationships among sea-floor age, earthquakes, and volcanoes to understand how they support the theory of plate tectonics.

Exploring Monsoon Precipitation and Streamflow in a Semi-Arid Watershed—Investigate the effect of summer thunderstorms on streamflow in a semi-arid watershed in Arizona.

Investigating Earthquakes with AEJEE—Download earthquake data from the USGS. Bring it into a GIS and analyze it to predict where the next big earthquake will occur on Earth.

Is Greenland Melting?—Explore map layers to examine annual melting and long-term changes of Greenland's ice sheet.

Looking into Earth with GIS—Examine seismic wave data in a GIS and analyze wave velocities to infer the depth of the crust-mantle boundary.

Mapping Local Data—Follow a study of Urban Heat Islands as an example of a map-based science research project.

Protecting Wetlands from Exurban Development—Examine land-use changes around Macclenny, Florida. Propose locations for future development that minimize impacts on wetlands.

Tsunami Run-up Prediction for Seaside, Oregon with My World GIS—Download and examine global, historical tsunami run-up patterns. Acquire DEM contours and import them into My World GIS. Then visualize the potential sea level rise that could occur during a tsunami run-up event near Seaside, Oregon.