This content has been created with the intent for the teacher to develop it to best suit their classroom setting. In its most basic form, students are asked to analyze wet and dry berry data to determine how water content changes (or doesn’t) for several berry species over the course of one season.
This lesson has multiple stages or
The night before I left Alaska I stayed up chatting with some of the scientists in the Toolik dining hall talking about my return to “normal civilization”. We spoke about the little habits that you pick up while at the field station and aren’t sure you’re going to let go (wearing sunglasses 24/7) as well as
This is the archive of the PolarConnect event with teacher Liza Backman and the team from the Phenology and Vegetation in the Warming Arctic 2021 expedition who presented live from Toolik Field Station in Alaska on 15 June 2021.
News article on teacher Liza Backman and her experiences preparing for a trip to the Arctic to work on the phenology of arctic plants in a warming climate.
Students will collect soil samples and analyze them with some of the same procedures used by researchers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica. Soil microfauna (e.g. nematodes) will be extracted from the samples using a Baermann funnel. Students will compare their own data to published data from researchers working in Antarctica.
PolarTREC has been an amazing experience, wow! The heart of the PolarTREC program is the field expedition, which allows the teacher to be embedded in a field research team. STEM educators are passionate about what they teach but often lack access to meaningful opportunities to participate in basic research. Programs like PolarTREC provide that missing
Teacher Josh Heward discusses research with the "Tough Tardigrades Team" in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica where they search for tardigrades and other microorganisms that live in the soil.
This outreach piece in Nature describes the aspects of bringing various guests on field science expeditions. The PolarTREC program is a focus amongst the programs providing some best practices as the author offers advice to scientists considering the addition of guests on expeditions.
This article and associated video describe the findings of researchers who undertook core drilling at Lake El’gygytgyn, a lake that sits today inside a basin formed by a meteorite that struck the earth 3.6 million years ago. An associated video allows us to hear the enthusiasm and details as researcher Julie Brigham-Grette describes the findings of this remarkable discovery.