Building Sea-Level Rise and Flood Resilience Capacity in the Northern Gulf Through Students and Teachers

Description: Coastal flooding and sea-level rise coupled with above-average regional socioeconomic vulnerability and rapid development are exacerbating hazard impacts in the northern Gulf of Mexico. In order to actively develop and execute resilience actions, it is imperative for future natural resource managers, elected officials, and voters to understand the potential risks to their communities. This project aims to help create an informed and prepared coastal citizenry possessing the understanding and skills necessary to reduce coastal vulnerability to flooding and sea-level rise. Collaborating with area educators in coastal Alabama and Mississippi, the project will develop and refine an engaging, hands-on curriculum for 9th-12th grade students pertaining to flooding and sea-level rise resilience and conduct outreach to support its use in classrooms and nontraditional educational settings throughout the region.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Conceptualizing Human Alteration and Natural Growth in Estuaries and Savannas (CHANGES)

Description: The Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Mississippi is home to several unique ecosystems that experience ongoing challenges from natural and human-caused disruptions. Maintaining and restoring the health of these ecosystems requires the constant application of management, monitoring, and restoration efforts. This project plans to use these unique habitats and the current management, monitoring, and restoration practices employed on them as a platform to educate students about ecological processes and ecosystem function. To advance their scientific and environmental literacy, local 9th-12th grade students from the surrounding area will be provided with a series of immersive educational experiences in the estuary and pine savanna involving critical thinking exercises and hands-on engagement with the work being done by natural resources managers at the reserve.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Environmental Health Youth Council Promoting Science-based Learning and Leadership for Underserved Houston-Area Youth

Description: As a result of extensive industrial activity, the Houston, Texas, area suffers from chronic air quality issues and associated health impacts. As global warming continues, more frequent and extreme rainfall events are expected to result in massive flooding and increased pollution, such as that resulting from Hurricane Harvey. The Houston area communities most at risk from air pollution and climate change impacts are predominantly low-income, underserved communities along the Houston Ship Channel. This project aims to prepare 9th-12th grade youth in these communities to become future leaders on climate and air pollution issues and more knowledgeable about how to help improve the health and prosperity of their communities. High school students will be organized into year-long Environmental Health Youth Councils and provided with leadership training and science-based educational experiences pertaining to resiliency planning and improving environmental conditions. In addition, a complementary museum exhibit will be developed to reach broader audiences.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Magnolia Bayou: A Catalyst for Change in Downtown Bay St. Louis, Mississippi

Description: Magnolia Bayou, an important coastal stream flowing into the Bay of St. Louis, is designated as a highly impaired waterway in Mississippi. The Magnolia Bayou Watershed is an area that includes much of downtown Bay St. Louis, a growing community experiencing an influx of new development that is placing increased pressure on Magnolia Bayou. A conservation plan for the Magnolia Bayou Watershed identified community outreach and engagement as the most important strategy for dealing with these increasing pressures and protecting the watershed. This project aims to engage 9th-12th grade students in exploring policies and actions the community can use to address threats to the Magnolia Bayou Watershed while also learning about professions related to environmental stewardship and mechanisms that can be used to influence change. Through the project, students will participate in a series of workshops and field experiences to learn about water quality issues impacting the watershed and interact with decision-makers and conservation professionals working to protect the watershed.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Okefenokee - Understanding Real-world Relevance through Suwannee Watershed Assessment and Monitoring Project (OUR2 SWAMP)

Description: While local watersheds and the larger water bodies they ultimately flow into can seem geographically distant and disconnected from one another, activities occurring in the local watersheds and the overall ecosystem health of these watersheds have significant downstream impacts on the ecological health of the larger water bodies. This is particularly true of the Gulf of Mexico, which receives water from rivers draining from 31 states. This project aims to increase 6th-12th grade students’ understanding of these causal relationships and is focused around the Okefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia and its impact on the Gulf of Mexico. The project will train and provide ongoing support for teachers to integrate local ecosystem monitoring—through Adopt-A-Stream and other citizen science projects—with problem-based learning and fieldwork to provide first-hand demonstrations for students of the connection between their local watershed and the Gulf of Mexico. Community demographics in the region will also result in increased participation of underrepresented and underserved populations in citizen science.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Project Resilience: Empowering Gulf Coast Youth to Thrive in Transformative Communities

Description: Coastal communities in Louisiana, as elsewhere along the Gulf Coast, are being impacted by rising sea levels, changes in storm intensity, and coastal erosion. These impacts are expected to grow over time as global warming increases and land subsidence continues. Most students in the region understand they are living in one of the fastest changing areas on the planet but knowledge about why the changes are occurring and what can be done in response is less widespread. This project aims to educate 9th-12th grade coastal Louisiana students on the science behind the challenges coastal communities are facing and empower them to use that science to develop community resilience plans addressing the challenges. The project team will develop an environmental science curriculum focused on the Gulf Coast and a toolkit that students can use to guide them through a resilience planning process. A select number of the resilience plans developed will be chosen to receive support for implementation and the educational resources developed will be made available to educators throughout the Gulf Coast region.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Seeding Wetland Restoration and Conservation in Mississippi High Schools

Description: While coastal degradation and poor water quality are chronic issues affecting the lives of those living across coastal Mississippi, many students in the region often have a perceived disconnect between themselves and the environment. Some potential reasons for this disconnect include limited exposure to natural landscapes, despite living in nearby proximity to them, and an inadequate understanding of people’s reliance on natural systems. This project aims to help address this disconnect by providing 10th-12th grade students with hands-on educational experiences that promote the stewardship of natural ecosystems and develop understanding of how the health of natural environments contributes to coastal resilience. The project will develop and implement a paired wetland nursery and education program for high schools in coastal Mississippi that will involve students learning about coastal wetlands, growing wetland plants in nurseries, planting their nursery-grown plants on coastal restoration projects, and conducting related student-designed research projects.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

WeatherBlur: Engaging Students in Mississippi, Alabama, and Maine through Citizen Science and Inquiry-Driven Project-Based Learning

Description: Coastal communities around the country face environmental challenges stemming from natural and human-caused disasters that affect community health. Developing an understanding about natural systems and the interdependence of people and the natural environment is critical to helping prepare students to address these challenges in the future. This project aims to build scientific and environmental literacy among underserved 4th-6th grade students in coastal Alabama, Maine, and Mississippi through co-created citizen science and action projects pertaining to environmental health. The effort will be based around an existing online platform, WeatherBlur, which connects students and classroom educators with science experts to collaborate on developing project research questions, collecting field data, sharing results, and discussing actions students can take in their local communities to address the challenges on which their projects focused.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Youth-Led Community-Based Citizen Science Projects in the Gulf Region

Description: U.S. Gulf Coast communities face a convergence of environmental concerns with distinct social, cultural, economic, political, and regulatory factors that create complex situations that many of these communities find themselves challenged to address. For this reason, the Gulf region is both a fitting and important place to foster youth to become civic-minded, scientifically literate members of society engaged in building more resilient communities. This project aims to build the capacity of Gulf region youth to address environmental issues affecting their communities by engaging them in hands-on science learning and practice relevant to their lived experience. The project will pilot a community citizen science learning model that positions young people as knowledge producers rather than knowledge consumers. With teacher support, students between 12 and 18 years old will lead research projects on local environmental topics that they have identified as important. Materials developed and refined through the pilot effort will be made available for use by other educators throughout the region.

Funding Cycle: Capacity Building 2
Funding Organization: National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine: Gulf Research Program

Survey response data to perceptions of human and natural changes to ecosystems from students of southeast Mississippi

Gulf Coast Educator's Workshop Summer 2019

Student-Led Inquiry Project Tracker

Creating a Box Plot to Identify Potential Outliers Using CODAP

Student-Led Community Science Curriculum Data Collection Resources

What Factors Influence Our Environmental Problem? (Lesson Plan)

How do communities respond to environmental problems? (Lesson Plan)

Workshop III: How Have Other Communities Tackled This Problem?

Workshop IV: What do we know, and what do we want to learn?

Workshop VI: How can an environmental study effect change?

Workshop VII: How will we study our environmental problem?

Workshop VIII: What will we do to conduct our study?

Workshop V: How Do We Study an Environmental Issue?