Activity:  Creating relationships between local land use and seal habitat.

Pre-Activity:  Examination of Landsat maps of land use.

Do Now:  Show what Landsat maps you found and what you thought about them.

Aim:  To assemble data into models for analysis, prediction, and mitigation.

Major Assignment:  Compare and contrast land use patterns at using Landsat data.

Processes, Skills, Goals:  Using remote sensing data to create and tell a science story.  Compare locations, times, and effects of the areas around seal habitat.  Assess the data via Gersmehl's spatial thinking hierarchy.  Predict future possibilities, keeping in mind the cyclical nature of nature.  Why and how land use affects local waters.

Content:  Landsat Models of Land Use

Instructions:  Assess what students explained about their Landsat findings.  Transform the discussion into one on models of behavior in nature.  These could be the behaviors of organism choice, or cause and effect relationships inherent in non-thinking behaviors.  Models are constructed from data, and then tested with alternate data.  Models are often challenged, tested, and modified according to peer-review principles, and sometimes not.  A common model is the NDVI.  It uses Landsat bands to create a model of vegetation.  Explain how the NDVI is created, and how it is used.  

Materials:  Slide show of visible wavelength EM definitions and examples.

Guiding Questions: What did you find in the Landsat images?  What use could this knowledge be?  Can you guess what the image would look like a month later?  Or earlier?  How could you test that hypothesis?  How could you test how accurate you were?  What about vegetation?  How could we assess vegetation?  Do we have to limit ourselves to what we see with our eyes?  Would a standard method help different scientists share conclusions about modeled behavior?  How could NDVI model analysis improve understanding of the behavior of seals? 

Homework:  Using your previous landsat image as a starting point, predict what the image would look like earlier in time.  Download those images and see the difference.  Were you partially correct?  How could you measure how accurate your guess is?