Education Resources & Citizen Science
The Mass Audubon at Joppa Flats hosts community science programs for climate change monitoring, bird sightings, and firefly watches. They also provide general information on invasive plants and educational materials.
The Parker River National Wildlife Refuge has self guided tours and a great deal of information for visitors.
NOAA Climate Education Resources has four modules available for teachers to use in the classroom to help students understand the earth’s climatic processes. The modules cover the carbon cycle, changing seasons, climate change impacts, and climate monitoring.
NOAA Sea Grant Educational Resources offers a variety of resources for teachers. The Bridge is Sea Grant’s online collection of ocean education resources and lesson plans that provides educators with a convenient source of accurate and useful information on global, national, and regional marine science topics, and gives researchers a contact point for educational outreach.
NASA’s Climate Kids website brings climate science to life with fun games, interactive features and exciting articles.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) collection of climate change lessons and activities for grades K-12 is aligned with Next Generation Science and Common Core Math Standards and incorporates NASA missions and science along with current events and research.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) Center for Science Education has short articles, interactives, classroom activities, images, and videos to help you learn how the Earth works.
The CLEAN project, a part of the National Science Digital Library, provides a reviewed collection of resources for students K-12 through college to aid students' understanding of the core ideas in climate and energy science, coupled with the tools to enable an online community to share and discuss teaching about climate and energy science.
Center for Climate and Energy Solutions Climate Classroom contains resources that help students and teachers understand how and why the climate is changing, how climate change affects us, and what we can do about it.
The Encylopedia of Life (EOL) Education & Learning page has lesson plans, podcasts, biodiversity cards, and more to learn about biodiversity and the natural world.
The CLEAN project, a part of the National Science Digital Library, provides a reviewed collection of resources for students K-12 through college to aid students' understanding of the core ideas in climate and energy science, coupled with the tools to enable an online community to share and discuss teaching about climate and energy science.
Coding Club is a group of ecology and environmental science students and researchers from the University of Edinburgh that create tutorials and courses in coding, data science and statistics with examples in R, Python, JavaScript and Python. They offer a free and self-paced Data Science for Ecologists and Environmental Scientists course to learn to use R to manipulate, graph and analyse ecological data, or build on your existing skills to create advanced data visualisations or master new analysis techniques such as mixed-effect modelling, ordination and more. Coding Club is for everyone, regardless of their career stage or current level of knowledge.
Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke is a guide to making visualizations that accurately reflect the data, tell a story, and look professional. The entire book is written in R Markdown, using RStudio as a text editor and the bookdown package to turn a collection of markdown documents into a coherent whole. The book’s source code is hosted on GitHub, at https://github.com/clauswilke/dataviz.
The DataOne Data Management Skillbuilding Hub is a repository for open educational resources regarding data management. DataOne also offers monthly webinars with discussions on open science, the role of the data lifecycle, and achieving innovative science through shared data and ground-breaking tools.
The NCEAS Learning Hub supports environmental scientists throughout their data science journey. They teach cutting-edge data science curriculum, facilitate collaborative learning, and promote best practices in open science. While their courses have a fee, many of their training materials are available for free.
The NEON Learning Hub offers educational resources that include online tutorials to gain the data skills needed to work with NEON data, teaching modules and materials for professors to use in graduate and undergraduate classrooms, and short, insightful videos about a wide variety of science topics.
Open Educational Resources (OER) offers tens of thousands of free educational resources across disciplines and education levels curated from a wide variety of creating institutions, and organized by subject area and material type. Contains full courses, modules, lessons, etc., in addition to textbooks. Funded by nonprofit ISKME.
OpenStax is a project based at Rice University that develops open access textbooks. Offerings are primarily in mathematics and the sciences.
Open Textbook Library is a large, well-organized collection of textbooks licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Assembled by the University of Minnesota and supported by the Open Education Network.
53 Sources for Climate Change News (Milken Institute School of Public Health, 2020) contains links to reputable sources with information about what is happening, what is being done by key stakeholders and how they can contribute to climate change mitigation at the individual level.
America’s Climate Choices (2011) is a consensus study report from the National Academy’s National Research Council that makes the case that the environmental, economic, and humanitarian risks posed by climate change indicate a pressing need for substantial action now to limit the magnitude of climate change and to prepare for adapting to its impacts.
Center for Climate and Energy Solutions Climate Basics provides the basics on climate science, key energy and emissions trends, extreme weather, and other climate impacts.
NASA’s Global Climate Change website provides a vast library of articles, videos, images, graphics, and more to explore climate data and research.
Climate Central provides both background material and up to date news on climate and weather, energy and sea-level rise. It has excellent graphics and an interactive map on how sea level changes in storms may impact coastal communities.
Real Climate is a discussion site for climate scientists. It includes discussions on recent findings. It is aimed largely for scientists but an informed citizen will find the discussions interesting and enlightenting. For a more basic introduction the site contains up to date links to other sites.
Project BudBurst is designed for individuals or groups to make regular observations of a plant(s) in their local area. The web site has all of the information you need to chose and identify plants in your area and record changes over the season. This information is being collected throughout the country and helps scientists track regional changes in climate.
The US National Phenology Network brings together citizen scientists, government agencies, non-profit groups, educators and students of all ages to monitor the impacts of climate change on plants and animals in the United States. The site contains many suggested activities and many plant and animals that could be monitored. The Educators’ Clearinghouse houses educational materials (lesson plans, activity guides, syllabuses, project design plans), to provide a convenient and growing collection of resources on phenology learning both inside and outside of the traditional classroom setting.
MassBays Interatcive Ecosystem Delineation and Assessment Map MassBays has used data from its comprehensive Ecosystem Delineation and Assessment to create an interactive Story Map. This tool draws from the most current data sets on everything from nearshore shellfishing areas to upland population density. The interactive map can display specific data sets (such as bird nesting sites, mooring fields, and road crossings), allowing users to view intersecting resource uses and habitats in the 68 rocky shore, beach, and embayment locations mapped by MassBays for detailed assessment and planning purposes.
Encylopedia of Life (EOL) is working to put all of our knowledge of the species on earth in a free electronically available encyclopedia. Both experts and amateurs are encouraged to contribute information and pictures on species, and their ranges.
Encylopedia of the Earth (EoE) is a free electronic reference about the Earth. It is reviewed by experts but the content on natural environments, and their interaction with society is contributed by a wide variety of scholars, educators, and practitioners. The content is presented in a style intended to be useful to students, educators, scholars, professionals, as well as to the general public.