Carbon Cycle Field Activities
Field activities allow students to collect and analyze data about their local environment to facilitate a greater understanding of the role that ecosystems play in the global carbon cycle.
The field section of the Carbon Cycle project begins in the classroom with a set of engagement activities where students perform basic exercises that enable them to answer fundamental science content questions, including how is vegetation measured, what is vegetation biomass and how is it calculated, and how does biomass relate to carbon storage? It is important that these activities be performed or that students have a concrete understanding of the topics prior to heading to the field, to be sure that students know why they are collecting data.
Students then follow pre-written or self-created procedures for collecting data to answer the essential question: How much carbon is stored in our schoolyard?
Field data collection is followed by a data analysis component that guides students to consider what their data mean and how the information they gain is relevant to the study of the carbon cycle.
Results from the field data analysis can be compared to results obtained during modeling activities.