by Richard Kool
WHAT in the world is happening? How do we know? Philosophers speak of epistemology as the study of how we come to know what we know. Let's take a look at how we are coming to know what's going on in the environment. One place to look is the on-line world of environmental monitoring. The net offers environmental educators opportunities to keep up with monitoring trends as well as to contribute to the ongoing collection of meaningful data that helps a wide range of agencies understand how our global environmental experiment is unfolding. For there is no doubt that we are engaged in a great and uncontrolled experiment of global change, and it will be decades still before we understand the implications of our present actions.
The first place to stop when it comes to looking for a central location of environmental monitoring data is the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC). (1) This organization has a particular interest in developing and providing information on the following: conservation of the Arctic environment; loss of forest biodiversity; marine and coastal habitats (including special databases on coastal reef and mangrove ecosystems); the world's protected areas; threatened animals and plants; and trade in threatened animals and plants.
Of particular interest is WCMC's graphical database of global, regional and national forest cover. Here you can look at country maps or download a variety of files, including a GIS (ArcInfo) map of very high resolution (and very large size: 7.5 MB). The speed of your connection will determine whether you can make use of these images, but they are very good for students interested in understanding what is happening in the global forest environment. Also found here are the 1996-97 Red Lists of endangered species and the 1993 United Nations list of protected areas.
At the site of the Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network (EMAN),(2) approximately 100 research and monitoring sites in Canada are organized into 14 Ecological Science Cooperatives. This project gives Canadians a national perspective on the effects of human activity on our ecosystems and serves as an early warning system for new environmental problems as they emerge. EMAN concentrates on the monitoring of species diversity in Canada, and has entire monitoring protocols on line. You can find frameworks for monitoring certain habitats (protocols for marine, freshwater and terrestrial habitats) or certain groups of organisms (e.g. invasive and exotic plants, earthworms, arthropods). More protocols are being developed all the time. EMAN is interested in engaging the educational community, and would like to have more groups working with them.
For teachers, the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) project (3). must be one of the best on the net. GLOBE brings together students and teachers in 65 countries to do regular environmental monitoring. The site provides clear instructions on a variety of activities:
Students enter their data via the GLOBE web page, and can then see a visualization of it as it is pooled with the observations of others around the globe. One very interesting option is that you can very quickly get a picture of the world for any particular date and dataset you choose.
Of course, someone monitoring the state of the Titanic could have an interesting project measuring the rise of water in the ship's hold and the changing slope of the deck. But who cares about the slope of the deck if the ship is going down and no one is doing anything about it
Cybersites for enviroment monitoring>
Richard Kool is the Interpretation and Education
Officer of BC Parks, British Columbia Ministry of Environment,
Lands and Parks, in Victoria, British Columbia. His address is
rkool@cln.etc.bc.ca