Climate Explorations & Climate Collaborative: Bringing Cutting-Edge Science and Hands-On Investigations to Your Neighborhood and Building Collective Action on Climate Change Education

IMPACT. 1: Public lectures in venues throughout Central Ohio, that will also be streamed live and made available online, for scientists to share their research and personal stories with individuals of all ages. -- 2. A booklet of climate change instructional materials that can be used in both formal and informal education environments with youth, and interactive experiences with scientists for field-testing of these materials. -- 3. A venue for climate change education partners across the region to share best practices, target their resources, and collectively monitor progress.OSU PARTNERS: 4-H; Ohio Sea Grant & Stone Laboratory; Department of Astronomy; The STEAM Factory; Center for Applied Plant Sciences (CAPS); Center for Automotive Research (CAR)COMMUNITY PARTNERS: Grange Insurance Audubon Center; Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens; Battelle Darby Metropark; Columbus Zoo & Aquarium; WCBEPRIMARY CONTACT: Jason Cervenec ([email protected])Climate Explorations will bring OSU researchers, extension agents, and outreach staff into neighborhoods throughout Central Ohio to interact with youth through hands-on activities, and with adults through public presentations. Partnerships with local organizations provide project sites and ensure diverse audiences. The project will stream webinars that will later be available online and field-test activities to be included in a youth booklet. A Climate Collaborative will be started to coordinate climate change education initiatives in Central Ohio

Building Climate Change Resilience in Columbus through University and Community Engagement

During the past four years, the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center (BPCRC) has contributed to the development of a climate risk and vulnerability report that subsequently resulted in an effort to create a Climate Change Action Plan for the city of Columbus. This process involved conversations and focus groups with stakeholders and technical experts, from both on- and off-campus, to synthesize a document usable by city leaders and local decision makers. Stakeholders have included individuals from city government, public utilities, businesses, nonprofits, and the faith community. During the project, the State Climate Office of Ohio helped identify experts, and The STEAM Factory provided a convenient meeting venue. This project has established BPCRC as a local and regional facilitator of conversations around scientifically vetting climate information and moved Columbus toward becoming a more climate resilient community. This presentation will include an overview of the draft Columbus Climate Change Action Plan and process by which it was created.AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Aaron Wilson, Senior Research Associate, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center and The Ohio State University Extension, [email protected] (Corresponding Author); Jason Cervenec, Education and Outreach Director, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center; Geoff Dipre, Doctoral Candidate, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center.The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center (BPCRC) has contributed to the development of a climate risk and vulnerability report that subsequently resulted in an effort to create a Climate Change Action Plan for the city of Columbus. This process involved conversations and focus groups with stakeholders and technical experts, from both on and off campus, to synthesize a document usable by city leaders and local decision makers. Stakeholders have included individuals from city government, public utilities, businesses, nonprofits, and the faith community. The State Climate Office of Ohio helped identify experts, and The STEAM Factory provided a convenient meeting venue. This project has established BPCRC as a facilitator of conversations around scientifically vetting climate information and moved Columbus toward becoming a more climate-resilient community. This poster will include an overview of the draft Columbus Climate Change Action Plan and process by which it was created

Research on Elementary, Middle, and Secondary Earth and Space Sciences Teacher Education

In order to fully engage with the vision of the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the NGSS, our nation needs a diverse and well prepared K-12 science teacher workforce. And in order for ESS to gain equal status with other sciences, the geoscience community must ensure that the K-12 science teacher workforce is adequately prepared to teach ESS core knowledge and practices. This is a challenging endeavor and complicated by the fact that the K-12 teacher education landscape is highly variable across institutions in terms of how much ESS content is included, how programs are structured, and how ESS fits into the larger institutional context. Teacher education exists in a complex landscape that involve many domains of research. This theme chapter focuses on teacher education research that most directly aligns to the undergraduate teaching and learning experience. Three grand challenges emerged from discussion and reflections on the existing literature and are poised to guide future research on undergraduate K-12 teacher education

Columbus Climate Adaptation Plan

The Columbus Climate Adaptation Plan (CCAP) is the result of four years of effort that involved looking critically at climate change impacts, risks, and vulnerabilities in Columbus. The result is a set of prioritized actions that should be taken by city government, regional organizations, and residents to make the city more climate resilient. This document utilizes our understanding of Earth processes and climate change to help inform our local public policies. The CCAP Task Force sought involvement of stakeholders, technical experts, and the general public in developing this plan

Permafrost Discovery Gateway: A web platform to enable discovery and knowledge-generation of permafrost Big Imagery products

Permafrost thaw has been observed at several locations across the pan-Arctic in recent decades, yet the pan-Arctic extent and potential spatial-temporal variations in thaw are poorly constrained. Thawing of ice-rich permafrost can be inferred and quantified with satellite imagery due to the subsequent differential ground subsidence and erosion that also affects land surface cover, storage and flow of water, sediment, and nutrients. However, a lack of supporting cyberinfrastructure necessary to harness information from the existing and rapidly growing collection of high-resolution satellite imagery (Big Imagery) has limited our advances in understanding the nature of pan-Arctic permafrost degradation. In the coming four years, we will empower the broader Arctic community with a cyberinfrastructure platform, the Permafrost Discovery Gateway (PDG), aimed at making Big Imagery permafrost information accessible and discoverable through novel visualization and analysis tools designed with input from users of the PDG, e.g. the diverse peoples living, working, and/or studying in the Arctic. From the start of the project, we will engage the user-community through in-person and online meetings to ensure effective development of permafrost Big Imagery products for archiving, processing, analyzing, and visualizing. The framework will utilize existing resources, such as the (1) NSF supported data management resources the Arctic Data Center and Clowder, (2) web application visualization tools (Fluid Earth Viewer, Google Earth, and Gapminder Foundation), (3) high performance computing resources (XSEDE, Google Earth Engine etc.), and (4) and satellite imagery (Polar Geospatial Center, Landsat, Sentinel, and Planet). The PDG will include the management of ingesting remote sensing big data into machine and deep learning models. We welcome collaborations with national and international Native, industry, and academic organizations and individuals to ensure broad community engagement and dissemination. The PDG will enable diverse peoples to contribute to and have access to pan-Arctic permafrost knowledge, which can immediately inform the economy, security, and resilience of the Nation, the Arctic region, and the globe with respect to pan-Arctic change

The Permafrost Discovery Gateway: A web platform to enable knowledge-generation from big geospatial data

Permafrost thaw has been observed at several locations across the pan-Arctic in recent decades, yet the pan-Arctic extent and potential spatial-temporal variations in thaw are poorly constrained. Thawing of ice-rich permafrost can be inferred and quantified with satellite imagery due to the subsequent differential ground subsidence and erosion that in turn affects land surface cover. Information contained within existing and rapidly growing collections of high-resolution satellite imagery (Big Imagery) is here extracted across the Arctic region through a collaboration between software engineers, computer- and earth scientists. More specifically, we are a) developing geospatial data down to sub-meter resolution, and also b) enabling discovery and knowledge-generation through visualization tools. This cyberinfrastructure platform, the Permafrost Discovery Gateway (PDG), is being designed with input from users of the PDG, e.g. primarily the Arctic earth science community but also the general public. The PDG builds upon other NSF supported data management resources (Arctic Data Center and Clowder) and the Fluid Earth Viewer. The Fluid Earth Viewer, which is the first visualization tool implemented into the PDG, was initially created for the public to explore atmospheric and oceanographic visualizations and is here modified to support permafrost geospatial products, and a number of community built analytic tools to identify permafrost artifacts within satellite imagery. The effort also includes workflow optimization of remote sensing code for pan-Arctic sub-meter scale mapping of ice-wedge polygons from optical imagery. We are additionally actively engaging with the user-community to ensure that the PDG becomes useful, both in terms of the type of data contained within the PDG and the design of the visualization tools. The PDG has the potential to fill key Arctic science gaps, such as bridging plot to pan-Arctic scale findings, while also serving as a resource informing decisions regarding the economy, security, and resilience of the Arctic region