The Data is In; What did Spring Looking Like this Year?
On Friday we went up to the pool for the last
time this year. We also returned some of the critters we had been keeping in
the classroom. I also just uploaded all the data for this spring.
Judy Gibson, Francis Parker Charter School, Devens, Ma.
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NEW DATABASE FEATURE:
Field Site Photos can be shared in Field Site Description section of the online database.
Teachers can email their field site photos to Emery Boose to post on the online database at any time.
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Excerpt from HF Schoolyard Field Site Data Base with link to Photo Above
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Schoolyard teacher, Janet Gordon has sent this photo of her field site from Tewksbury High School. See all sites' field site data at: http://harvardforest2.fas.harvard.edu/asp/hf/php/admin/k12/k12_sites_list.php
Views from New York City
Photos and Excerpts from Brooklyn Technical High School students led by teacher Elisa Margarita. In her first year with the Schoolyard Ecology program, Elisa collaborated with veteran Schoolyard Teacher, Lise Letellier from Holyoke, Ma. to engage her students in analyzing and interpreting data.
Mei Hua Mei's AP Environmental Science Harvard Forest Schoolyard LTER program Report.
● Explanation:
The question of global warming and climate change is the theme of this experiment and the effect of both may be demonstrated through this intensive research conducted by Harvard's long term ecological research. Although the data presented above is only a small portion of the large platter of information presented to Harvard yearly, my data and the data collected this year is contributing to a larger look at the effects of climate change and global warming on our ecosystems. Climate change is creeping up on us, and we do not even realize it. Throughout the years, our ecosystems have been slowly changing and we may not have noticed because of these slow changes. With year after year of contributions to the study, Harvard is able to piece together a broad spectrum of the effects of Climate change; effects that may not to obvious to us in our day to day lives.
Wrapping Up:
Through this experience, I was able to learn about collecting data and conducting research. It felt really great to be apart of a study that has been running for so long. It was truly an honor to be able to say “I am doing a project for Harvard.” Since this project started in the beginning of APES class, it was a good introduction to the skills we would need for the rest of the year. For example, we learned how to collect data, take measurements, identify trees, make observations, handle tools, work as a group, and more. So, not only was the Harvard Lab an honor to conduct, it was also a vital introductory project that would lead us to the rest of the course with an understanding for conducting research and working as scientists in a group.
This project was very eye opening and interesting to conduct. However the class and I encountered some difficulties. Since we did not have(past) data for our trees, we had to use data from another school. This presented a loss of purpose for the assignment because a large portion of our report went to analysing information for a tree we did not observe. This problem can be easily fixed by entering the data for our trees onto the Harvard database.
My favorite part of this project was having an opening and closing for our APES year. The Harvard Project was our opening assignment for the school year and one of the last assignments in the closing of the year. We started this project with all of our Firsts of the year. Our first time going to fort greene for class, our first time doing a lab, and our first time working in groups with kids that we barely knew. And by the end of the year, when we went out again to take our Spring data, it was our two hundredth time going to fort greene for class, our nine hundredth lab, and our fiftieth time working in groups with our closest schools friends.
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Mohamad
Amin 6/12/2016
AP
Environmental Science
Harvard
Forest Schoolyard Ecology - American Elm and Red Maple
Our tree
was an American Elm, or Ulmus Americana, it is a deciduous tree with a range
all across the eastern United States, it favours a whole range of habitats but
generally likes being near areas with lots of water. It is a highly resistant
tree, the common enemy of this tree is the Dutch elm disease. It has elliptic
to lanceolate leaves that are pinnate and serrated, the leaves are arranged
alternately. This tree has a long growing season and can continue growing into
the late fall, unaffected by the loss of sunlight.
This experiment
was a group project, as a group we were free to select a tree and we chose the
American elm. During the autumn we measured the rate at which the leaves of the
tree changed colour and when/if the trees finally separated from the branch.
This was a weekly task and continued until winter. Once winter was over and
spring began, the project restarted with a different focus; we were to measure
the buds of the tree and see how long it took to begin sprouting new leaves.
Due to complications involving our data,
I was not able to complete this project using my own data. Instead I had to use
data from the Harvard Tree database. As of such I chose a Red Maple from the
data taken by Holyoke Catholic High School. The Red Maple is another extremely
hardy species with a varied habitat.
The data
taken from Holyoke indicated that this tree quickly bursts and gets it leaves
during the end of April and beginning of May. The Red Maple would go from no
leaves at all during the week of April 20th, it would have seventy percent
budburst during the following week and by the tenth of May it would be fully
opened.
Leaf Length follows similar trends
to the budburst. The tree is completely devoid of leaves until the end of April
but once the buds have burst, the leaves
grow rapidly. They reach 2 centimeters by the end of April and quickly jump up
to the 10 centimeters by around the beginning of May. After it has reached ten
centimeters, it quickly flattens out and stops growing. This is indicative of
quick growth and it would mean that Red Maples can quickly establish
themselves.
Trends can also be seen with the
changing of leaf colours for the Red Maple. The Red Maple seems to have a
slight on or off switch with the colour change. For the majority of the year,
since it gains its leaves they maintain a solid 2.0 tree color. However during
the week of 23 October, the tree undergoes a radical shift and the leaf colour
shifts radically. It gains its famous red coloration and is part of the
standard colour changing during the autumn season. The colour changes rapidly
from green to red, once the change begins and completes itself within the week,
the colouration does not change much anymore.
The amount
of leaves that have fallen from the trees followed similar trends too. The tree
would be completely fine for most of the year until a week in October. The week
of October 29th saw the Red Maple completely lose all of its leaves. It was not
even a period of a week, it was closer to four or five days, but in that time
the Red Maple managed to go from 0% leaf lost to 100% leaves lost. During this
time, Data was only taken twice between the time it went from 0 to 100 percent
lost. At one point it was at 40 percent but by the next time of data
collection, all of the leaves had fallen.
This project was a complicated a long term one.
The American Elm tree that we originally selected was a major part of it, we
got a lot of data on it but the fact that it was not very organized (the Spring
data was submitted and we didn’t have a backup) meant that it could not
actually be used for this report.
Spring Budburst Data Looks Like this from across 4 Schools:
Westfield, Mass.
Easthampton Mass.
Holyoke Mass.
Worcester, Mass.
Explore more data from this year
To see all data entered to our database this year go to:
download Schoolyard data
To see sites and their data on our interactive site map go to:
Interactive site-data map
To graph data from any of our Schoolyard field sites, go to:
Online graphing tool
Stay Tuned for part 2 of Looking at What Spring Data Looks Like..from Harvard Forest Ecologists and Schoolyard resources..Coming Soon
