January 14th, 2011
From the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway Management Team Notes:
“The annual midwinter eagle survey coordinated by USGS took place on Friday, January 7…. The number of eagles found shows a downward trend. This is our eighth year participating in this count.”
Graph of Bald Eagle Count
December 29th, 2010
"Mario" Toadstool
“I can still recall the kind of sensation I had when I was in a small river, and I was searching with my hands beneath a rock, and something hit my finger, and I noticed it was a fish…. That’s something that I just can’t express in words. It’s such an unusual situation. I wish that children nowadays could have similar experiences, but it’s not very easy.”
Who would you guess spoke that quote? A naturalist, scientist, or poet perhaps? Nope. The above quote is from the creator of Super Mario Brothers, Shigeru Miyamoto.
In a fascinating article from the New Yorker Shigeru Miyamoto’s (AKA the Father of Video Games) childhood is described as one filled with nature which has deeply inspired his video games.
From the article: “As he got older, he wandered farther afield, on foot or by bike. He explored a bamboo forest behind the town’s ancient Shinto shrine and bushwhacked through the cedars and pines on a small mountain near the junior high school. One day, when he was seven or eight, he came across a hole in the ground. He peered inside and saw nothing but darkness. He came back the next day with a lantern and shimmied through the hole and found himself in a small cavern. He could see that passageways led to other chambers. Over the summer, he kept returning to the cave to marvel at the dance of the shadows on the walls”
As a lover of all things Mario, this doesn’t surprise me. The most rewarding video game experiences I can remember are of discovering something new, mystic, and beautiful; very similar to my most memorable nature experiences. This ties nicely with a video I posted a while ago about using the powerful psychological motivators of video games for education. I think it demonstrates that the “plugged-in” world of today isn’t as far separated from a nature-based world as we may fear.
December 1st, 2010
This extremely interesting Ted Talk, from Harvard’s William L. Ury, brings up the concept that walking shoulder to shoulder can help resolve conflict. It seems there is a lot of potential in that idea for those of us in the field of environmental education who walk through the woods with strangers everyday.
November 17th, 2010
Google offers a free, fast, and easy way to plot longitude and latitude on google maps.
Plot Your Own Points on Google Map
Step One: Prep your data
Place your latitude and longitude information in a spreadsheet file (like Excel or Google Docs Spreadsheet). The long and lat need to be in decimal form. The first row of your columns should be the title of the column.
Spreadsheet Layout Sample
Step Two: Upload to Google Fusion Tables (you will need to login or create a free google account).
Choose Import Table and select the file you saved your prepped data in. Confirm which row contains the titles (I recommend always using the first row). And add in any meta data or titles you want. Click Finish!
Import Your Spreadsheet
Step Three: Check Out Your Awesome Map
After you click finish it will load a page with all your data on it. Click Visualize and then Map to see a map of all your coordinates. The data you uploaded will be visible when you click on each point on the map. This map can be shared and edited. There is much more you can do with the program, play around and have fun!
Check Out Your Map!
Troubleshooting: If you run into trouble it probably means your spreadsheet isn’t formated correctly. The map option won’t work if the coordinates are not in decimal from, if the titles are wonky, or if the latitude and longitude don’t have their own columns. Play around and experiment with trial and error- you’ll figure it out! Enjoy! Here’s a tutorial if you woud like more information!
November 11th, 2010
View Minneapolis Heritage Trees in a larger map
The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board has created an awesome interactive google map of “heritage trees” in the city.
A “Heritage Tree” is a tree that can fit into one of these three categories:
Champion Size (green on map): Trees that are the largest of their species
Significant Size (yellow on map): Trees worthy of recognition for size, but not the largest of their species
Historically/Culturally Significant (blue on map): Trees specifically associated with historical dates, events, people and city landmarks
From the MPRB Heritage Tree Website:
“The Judging Process
Nominated trees are examined and approved by staff from the MPRB Forestry Division. Nominations will be certified for addition to the official heritage tree list according to methods established by the Minnesota State Horticultural Society and American Forests. Heritage trees will be measured by height, circumference and crown spread. Measurement information can be found on the American Forests’ Measuring Guide. Minneapolis Tree Advisory Commission members will review and approve nominated trees for the Historical/Cultural Significance designation.
At times champion heritage trees are removed or damaged (e.g. the tornado of 1981 which destroyed the city’s champion ginkgo and green ash). When larger trees are discovered they may take the place of currently listed champion trees. A list is kept of all nominated trees for future consideration.”
Want to nomiate a tree? You can do it online, or mail it in.
November 9th, 2010
Here is a great Ted Talk analyzing what motivates people to spend hours and dollars on gaming and exploring how we can use those motivators in education and business:
November 3rd, 2010
Here’s a note forwarded from a friend at the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway (I think the email originated with Dale Cox):
“If you haven’t seen the St. Croix Falls river gauge in the last few days, it’s worth a moment to look at. The rise was caused by rainfall from the low pressure system that passed to the north the middle of last week: some areas of the upper watershed in Minnesota and Wisconsin received in excess of 2-3″ of rainfall in a little over 24 hours.
The short, dramatic peak to almost 40,000 cfs on October 30 was caused by Xcel closing the “bear trap” at St. Croix Falls, resulting in the flashboards on top of the dam releasing (the first time this has ever happened in the fall as far as I can tell). The mean discharge for the day
is calculated at 30,700 cfs.
To put this in context, there are 39,752 daily records at this location since 1902. Of those, on only 177 dates has the mean river flow exceeded 30,000 cfs, and only 20 of those occurred after May 31. The river has never previously exceeded 30,000 cfs after July.”
September 10th, 2010
I’ve come across a buffet of valuable environmental education links over the past week or so:
1. A variety of Oil Spill Curricula links from the National Environmental Education Foundation’s National Environmental Education Week webpage. Great for formal teachers and environmental educators alike!
2. The Biodiversity Heritage Library on-line collection. From their website “The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the digitization component of the Encyclopedia of Life, is a consortium of 12 major natural history museum libraries, botanical libraries, and research institutions organized to digitize, serve, and preserve the legacy literature of biodiversity.”
Translation: Free access to scanned natural history books.
Be sure to follow their blog for the Book of the Week feature. This weeks book is the Peregrin and Modern Aviation.
3. Henderson State University’s Arkansas Nature Trivia Page. Surprisingly addicting. Covers a wide array of topics from the adaptations of the spotted salamander to life as a goldenrod.
4. Free download of the Buy, Use, Toss? A Closer Look at Things We Buy curriculum from Facing the Future.org. According to the site, its a $20 value for free.
August 27th, 2010
The blog Tetrapod Zoology has become a regular stop in my surfing habits.
It’s chocked full of crazy interesting information about animals -common to rare, extant to extinct, and even imaginary to real. The best part about this blog is that it does no dumbing down. Evolutionary origins, research articles, and statistics are all presented in an easy straightforward manner.
An example clipped from a recent post:
“As you’ll no doubt already know, the remarkable morphology of the Matamata’s head and neck correlates with a remarkable feeding behaviour. Like various other turtles that lurk, concealed, on the bottoms of ponds, lakes and rivers, matamatas are (usually!) cryptic lunge-feeders that wait for small prey (typically fish) to come close…
Once the prey is within range, the Matamata engages in dynamic suction-feeding: a feeding Matamata gapes its jaws really wide (opening them to an angle of about 80°), and rapidly expands its throat to suck in a huge quantity of water – hopefully containing the prey. Structures normally present on the pleurodire palate (and apparently restricting their gapes to between 40-65°) have been strongly reduced (as discussed in the article on skull and hyoid anatomy). It’s fairly easy to get a Matamata to indulge in this behaviour if you tease it with bits of meat, or wiggle your fingers around in front of its face. Ordinarily, this sort of thing is only recommended when there’s a sheet of glass in the way, but it’s reported by people who have experienced matamata ‘attacks’ that their bites aren’t actually that painful. And they shouldn’t be, given the weak jaws, absence of beak tissue, and importance of suction and engulfment of water.”
About the blog author:
Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Portsmouth, UK) who mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs. He also messes around with swimming giraffes, fossil marine reptiles, British big cats and stuff like that. An avid interest in modern wildlife and conservation has resulted in many adventures in lizard-chasing, bird-watching and litter-collecting.
August 21st, 2010
This Nat. Geo. clip (while a bit sensationalized) is pretty neat-o:
I found it via the Science News Blog
