Activity:  Building models in geography.

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

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

Aim:  To build a predictive model of coastal land use.

Major Assignment:  Apply EM knowledge to examine local land use as it has changed over time.

Processes, Skills, Goals:  Use Landsat data to help explain land use and its effect on local water habitat.  Develop and use intuitive spatial analysis skills to examine local land use its effect on sea mammal habitat.  

Content:  Change over time and predictive models.

Instructions:  Now that students have seen examined local land use using Landsat data, extend that past analysis into a prediction of the future conditions.  Ask who decides how the land is used and how do they go about making that vision a reality.  Ask them to create a good, bad, or indifferent judgement on land use types.  Show the interconnected nature of geographic situations.

Materials:  Slide show of change over time showing expansion of human development, and areas of restoration.

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: