How do I evaluate coral reefs in Hawaii? overview inform explore try support
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Teacher Activities
  
Student Activities

Try using their new knowledge while analyzing the change of the Kailua Bay coral reefs in a temporal resolution activity.

Have students to look at the image that shows the decline of coral reefs in the past 25 years in the coast of Florida (Please just use the picture which is located in the middle of text for this activity. Texts/ contents of this site are not directly related to this lesson.)

Prompt students to think about whether there has been a dramatic decline in health and extent of the coral reef in Kailua Bay in the past years. If so, how can they monitor the changes?

Ask students to remember the temporal resolution that they learned in the lesson 'How do I plan a remote sensing mission' (please see the EXPLORE part for understanding temporal resolution) and explain that they will be participating in a temporal resolution activity for evaluating the change of the state of Kailua bay coral reefs.

Show the three visible images of Kailua Bay that were collected at different times.

  • January 10, 1998
    • (1) DMSV_color_mosaic
    • (2) DMSV_RGB_subset_Kailua
  • February 12, 2000
    • (1) Landsat_color_mosaic
    • (2) Landsat_RGB_subset_Kailua
  • April 12, 2000
    • (1) Aviris_color_mosaic
    • (2) Aviris_RGB_subset_Kailua

Ask students if there has been a change in the state of coral reefs in the past two years. If they can't see a change, prompt students to think about what they need to look at in order to evaluate the change.

Break students into their same groups and have each group explore the classification mapsand pie charts.

Ask each group to compare the classification maps in order to find out whether there has been a change in the past years and write the results of their investigation on the Activity sheet: Investigating the changes in the state of coral reefs in Kailua Bay since 1998.

Ask students to present their results of investigations to the class.

Prompt students to thinks about why they need to collect another AVIRIS image.

 

 

 

 

Ask students to predict possible changes to the state of coral reefs when new AVIRIS data are collected and analyzed .

Teacher Note:

When new, clear AVIRIS images are collected, students should analyze the new data to find the change of the state of coral reefs in the past year.

Debrief the activity: How do you evaluate the state of Kailua Bay coral reefs? Let students describe the process they went through and critical elements they considered to evaluate the state of coral reefs.

 

 

 

Students activity


Sample students answers:

  • There is not a change in the past years.
  • There is a dramatic decline in the Kailua Bay coral reefs. In order to do so, we can compare the data taken at the different times.

 

 

 

Student activity:

  • Students view the Kailua Bay coral reef images collected at different times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sample students answers:

  • We can't see any changes with these images. We also need classification maps.

 

Sample student activity:

  • Each group explores the classification maps and pie chart for evaluating the change in coral reefs since 1998.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sample student answers:

  • The AVIRIS (April 12th, 2000) image has clouds and cloud shadows in it. Due to the clouds and shadows, the percentage of living coral in this image are not very accurate because some of the reef is covered. It will be better to collect another AVIRIS data set without clouds or cloud shadows in it.