From Field to Satellite: Youth Leaders Discover the Importance of Ground Truthing Satellite Data
The Montshire Museum of Science is empowering a diverse group of high school students to address climate change through hands-on training in agricultural practices, water quality monitoring, and forest health assessment, utilizing NASA's GLOBE program to bridge local investigations with global NASA missions.
In Norwich, Vermont, the Montshire Museum of Science has been engaging a group of high school aged students from many corners of Vermont and New Hampshire in hands-on, workforce development training, geared towards addressing the unfolding challenges presented by climate change. Our group of 8, 9th-12th grade Youth Leaders for Climate Action, have harvested vegetables while learning about sinking carbon into the soil of regenerative farms; collected water quality data with local monitoring groups; and learned to measure forest health through a variety of monitoring protocols, assisted by a local Land Conservancy. NASA's GLOBE "Land Cover" protocol has given our Youth Leaders a unifying praxis, helping them to understand the potential relationship between the Geographic Information Systems software we typically employ to study large trends, and the field methods we use to study small, randomly positioned plots on the land. GLOBE models allow Youth Leaders to see the process of "ground truthing" satellite data, to build strong data sets that might later become raw input for models, GIS layers, or further geospatial data collection. Our Youth Leaders enjoy both aspects of the seemingly juxtaposing data entry (heading out into the forest to closely assess the trees present) and the outcomes of data entry (looking at their forest on the global scale)! In the future we hope to contribute to soil data and air quality as well. The GLOBE program is rigorous and after some practice relatively easy to interface with!