In this classroom activity, students access sea surface temperature and wind speed data from a NASA site, plot and compare data, draw conclusions about surface current and sea surface temperature, and link their gained understanding to concerns about global climate change.

SYNOPSIS: This lesson introduces students to the effects of climate change on animals and their habitats.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson allows students to understand what habitat means and how organisms interact within their range. Students would also be able to classify animals into different habitats, explore the impact of climate change on biodiversity in different ecosystems, and proffer ways to reduce these impacts. All the accompanying materials in the lesson are well-sourced, and this lesson has passed our science credibility review.

POSITIVES:
-This lesson opens up a conversation to discuss climate change through the topics of animals, which younger students can understand.
-This lesson allows students to practice using their agency and voice to make a change in their world.
-This lesson could be extended into a larger research project on specific animals and their habitats.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Students may need to review the vocabulary term habitat.
-Students may benefit from a cause and effect lesson prior to this lesson.
-A lesson on observational drawings and analyzing photography could be beneficial for some learners.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-The observation and chart assignments are naturally differentiated due to the inclusion of drawings and/or words. Students can draw or write depending on their level.
-Vocabulary word cards could be used for students who need assistance with vocabulary comprehension.
-Student groups/partners could be picked based on ability level or mixed ability level depending on the purpose of instruction.
-Students could complete the drawings or letters in a digital format as well.
-These articles could be utilized to expand the non-fiction article reading component for students who are able:
-How Does Climate Change Affect the Ocean?
-Learning about Climate from Oceans

The Ocean Health Index is a new, comprehensive measure of the ocean’s overall condition – one that treats people and nature as integrated parts of a healthy system. The ocean touches nearly every aspect of our lives – making it essential to the economic, social, and ecological well-being of everyone, everywhere. Evaluated globally and by country, the Ocean Health Index presents 10 public goals that represent the wide range of benefits that a healthy ocean provides to people. Each country’s overall score is the average of its 10 goal scores. Overall scores and individual goal scores are directly comparable between all countries. All scores range from 0 to 100.

This lesson explores El NiÃo by looking at sea surface temperature, sea surface height, and wind vectors in order to seek out any correlations there may be among these three variables using the My NASA Data Live Access Server. The lesson guides the students through data representing the strong El NiÃo from 1997 to 1998. In this way, students will model the methods of researchers who bring their expertise to study integrated science questions.

This video highlights research conducted at Woods Hole on how heat absorbed by the ocean and changes of ocean chemistry from human activities could lead to a tipping point for marine life and ecosystems. Includes ice bath experiment that models the tipping point of Arctic sea ice.

In this unit, students will explore how global climate change impacts marine ecosystems (especially kelp forests and coral reefs) and the survival and migration patterns of species within marine ecosystems. Students will examine how marine resources and fisheries upon which humans depend (especially marginalized and vulnerable human populations) are being affected by ocean warming and what we can learn from Indigenous peoples on how to mitigate the effects of ocean warming. Lastly, students will learn about innovative solutions to addressing the impacts of ocean warming and propose their own solution to the problem.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"In prokaryotes, DNA methylation participates in numerous cellular processes. Most studies on prokaryotic methylation have been conducted in culturable microbes, but the majority of environmental bacteria aren’t culturable. Therefore, the real-world diversity and functions of microbial methylation remain unclear. To learn more, researchers recently analyzed the microbes in Pacific Ocean seawater samples using meta-epigenomics. Through short- and long-read sequencing, they reconstructed 15,056 viral, 252 prokaryotic, 56 giant viral, and 6 eukaryotic metagenome-assembled genomes, most of which represented novel taxa. Single-molecule real-time (SMRT) sequencing revealed that DNA methylation was present across the dominant bacterial, archaeal, and viral populations and showed that epigenetic marks were correlated with population differentiation..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This wiki is a collaboration between current and former students at UC Davis, with Professor Tessa Hill. Content will include a broad survey of oceanography, including geological, chemical, physical and biological aspects, as well as significant content on major issues in Oceanography and human impacts on this environment. Oceanography is the branch of Earth science that studies the ocean and covers a wide range of topics, including marine organisms and ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dynamics; plate tectonics and the geology of the sea floor; and fluxes of various chemical substances and physical properties within the ocean and across its boundaries.

This textbook outlines the major processes and features of the world's oceans. Content starts with a review of important fundamentals of the natural and physical science related to oceanography. Following chapters focus on Earth history and evolution of life through time.

This video introduces phytoplankton - the base of the marine food web, the source of half of the oxygen on Earth, and an important remover of CO2 from the atmosphere. The video also explains how satellites are used to monitor phytoplankton and how warming waters and acidification negatively affect phytoplankton.

Seit mehreren Jahren steigt das Interesse an der Algenkultivierung in Europa. Makroalgen wie die S. Latissima gelten als eine attraktive, nachhaltige und zukunftsfähige Ressource, welche vielfältig verwendet werden können. Zudem mindern sie die ökologischen Auswirkungen des Klimawandels. Die Kultivierung der Algen und die ökologische Umwelt unterliegen einer reziproken Wechselwirkung. Ob in Zukunft eine Kultivierung im großen Maßstab in Europa stattfinden wird, hängt von potenziellen Anbauflächen und den sich durch den Klimawandel verändernden Einflussfaktoren ab. Die Forschung und Kultivierung der Algen in Europa stecken aktuell noch in den Kinderschuhen und benötigen weitere Forschungen und Erfahrungen.

This unit allows students to investigate past changes in Earth's climate. Students first explore relationships in climate data such as temperature, solar radiation, carbon dioxide, and biodiversity. They then investigate solar radiation in more depth to learn about changes over time such as seasonal shifts. Students then learn about mechanisms for exploring past changes in Earth's climate such as ice cores, tree rings, fossil records, etc. Finally, students tie all these together by considering the feedbacks throughout the Earth system and reviewing an article on a past mass extinction event.

This activity orally tests students understanding of the links between ocean processes and global climate change. It is set up as a debate with students serving as the science experts and volunteer faculty serving as the opposition team.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this project, students are all assigned citizen roles on a fictitious island community. Each citizen role has a set of values that they will maintain while the community argues how to recover from its economic decline. Two different industries have proposed to operate from the island, and students debate through a town council meeting, whether to bring one, both, or neither of these industries to the island, and if so, under what conditions.

This lesson focuses on the importance of ocean exploration as a way to learn how to capture, control, and distribute renewable ocean energy resources. Students begin by identifying ways the ocean can generate energy and then research one ocean energy source using the Internet. Finally, students build a Micro-Hydro Electric Generator.

The purpose of this resource is to help students understand the connection between remote sensing, computer imagery, and land cover assessment. Students translate their maps created in the beginning activity into digital code and exchange the digitized versions of their maps with students in another school.

The purpose of this resource is to familiarize students with the importance of perspective and various scales of remotely sensed data. Students create a 3-D model of an area and develop a classification system for the landforms in their model. The maps can then be used to answer certain questions about the environment.

The purpose of this resource is to familiarize students with modeling as it relates to remote sensing and digitized images. Students will use the symbolic map created in the beginning activity to produce a digitized image and begin to see why ground verification of satellite data is necessary.

This lesson guides a student inquiry into properties of the ocean's carbonate buffer system, and how changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may affect ocean pH and biological organisms that depend on calcification.

This video adapted from KTOO explores the impact of oil contamination on the herring population of Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1999, 10 years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.