By Peggy Ann Brown

Analyzing urban tree cover is no longer the purview of only city planners and conservationists. Middle and secondary school students from Rhode Island to Texas are documenting the condition and benefits of trees in their community.

Young people are mapping tree canopies, calculating the foliage's economic and environmental value, and sharing this information with decision makers, thanks to an environmental education program created by American Forests in conjunction with classroom teachers. The introduction it gives to Geographic Information System (GIS) technology is providing new insights on traditional disciplines and the foundation for GIS-oriented careers.

The program combines computer technology with tree planting and hands-on activities to teach students to value trees in their local areas. And while educational applications for American Forests' CITYgreen software are most often used in geography and science classes, GIS itself is finding its way into history, political science, and business classes. Students are using its mapping capabilities to analyze automobile purchases, voting patterns, and crime statistics.

"GIS is a tool that can be used in any and every discipline," says educational consultant Lyn Malone. "As long as data has an element that can be associated with a particular point on the earth's surface-a latitude and longitude coordinate or a zip code, for example-it can be analyzed with GIS."

'Ripe for Expansion'
While the development of GIS itself can be traced back to the early 1960s and earlier, its use in educational settings was minimal until a 1998 two-week summer institute brought together 32 teachers to consider its application for K-12 academics. Institute sponsors included National Geographic, the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Geological Survey, and ESRI, a GIS research and development firm which produces ArcView, the computer program used to run CITYgreen.

"The time was ripe for expansion," says Malone, who attended the conference. "Schools were beginning to have the necessary computer power and the technology was becoming more user-friendly."

Similarly, educational interest in CITYgreen, introduced in 1996, developed over time as teachers recognized its classroom potential. Analyses of CITYgreen purchases reveal educators now comprise about 50 percent of the customer base, reports Mike Lehman, who coordinates its sales for American Forests. While CITYgreen's advanced capabilities have proven popular at the college level, its appeal to earlier grades accounts for nearly a third of education sales.

Recognizing teachers' interests, American Forests worked with teachers to produce step-by-step lesson plans which introduce GIS concepts and lead students through an environmental analysis of their neighborhood using CITYgreen. Around the country, CITYgreen workshops are giving teachers the confidence to initiate GIS in the classroom.

Teachers using high-tech GIS tools to map and measure local trees say the kids are hooked and their possibilities are endless.

"Our secret weapon is hiring teachers to teach," says Lehman. "A certain synergy occurs when teachers lead the workshops because they can relate to the participants' experiences."

Malone, author of the CITYgreen lesson plans and a workshop instructor, concurs. "Teachers using GIS have to address different issues than people using GIS in business settings," she says. "They need to know how to manage 25 students in a computer lab or how to deal with their schools' technology setup."

A Community Service
Malone has plenty of insights to offer workshop participants. In 2002 she started World Views, a consulting firm specializing in spatial technologies education. Previously, she had taught for 32 years in Rhode Island, her last 18 as a middle school social studies teacher. She and two colleagues compiled Mapping Our World: GIS Lessons for Educators to share their insights.

Malone remembers her own GIS initiation at the 1998 summer institute for teachers.

"When I returned from the institute, I nervously took my class into the computer lab and was bowled over by the results," says Malone of her first attempt to integrate GIS with an analysis of sub-Saharan Africa living standards in her seventh grade world geography class. "There was a lot of unintended learning going on as students clicked around the map. I discovered it was a motivational tool that fostered a level of thinking that I loved seeing, and that I wasn't dragging out of them."

Building on this experience, Malone developed a repertoire of GIS lessons. In 2000, she and a colleague launched Project One, Two, Tree in response to a Rhode Island initiative that required each town to include a forestry component in its comprehensive plan.

"I thought it would be a great community service for students to set up a tree database that a town could expand indefinitely," says Malone. They piloted the project in their own town of Barrington, where 80 students learned about urban forestry and used CITYgreen to inventory their middle school's 217 trees, analyze the range of species, and document their condition. During the next year, Malone trained middle and high school teachers from 10 towns to conduct similar classes.

Social Studies Applications
While Malone's teaching experiences has helped her envision numerous classroom applications for GIS, a novice teacher in Washington, DC, is quickly learning how to integrate GIS into his lessons. Drew Swierczek, a Teach for America participant, is in his first year of teaching at McKinley Technology High School, a newly reopened inner-city school focused on providing technology skills applicable to an array of careers.

"I didn't even know what GIS was before my principal told me about it," says Swierczek, who was charged with developing Community as Laboratory, an elective that uses CITYgreen software to teach students GIS and the environmental benefits of urban trees.

"There was a lot of unintended learning going on as students clicked around the map. I discovered It was a motivational tool that fostered a level of thinking that I loved seeing and that I wasn't dragging out of them."

Using the CITYgreen manual, Swierczek taught himself the basics of GIS. While it was "easy to learn since I was doing it in three classes a day," he admits he also learned from students' mistakes as he helped them maneuver through the program.

The class is part of GreenTech, a program partnered by American Forests and Casey Trees, a philanthropic organization that sponsors activities to restore Washington, DC's tree cover. After learning GIS, the freshmen and sophomores conducted a tree inventory of their schoolyard and ran alternative scenarios for various planting schemes.

As part of the project, Casey Trees planted five trees on the school campus. Twelve of Swierczek's students participated in a Casey Trees' community planting, and he discovered students were savvier with GIS than with digging a hole for the trees.

"None of these kids had ever used a shovel or a pickax," he says. "They were holding their shovels like tennis rackets." In contrast, students' familiarity with computer strategy games allowed them to easily adapt to the satellite photos used in CITYgreen.

Having taught the course again in spring, Swierczek hopes next year's students can move out into the neighborhood to inventory trees. He also envisions teaching a social studies course using GIS applications to analyze how Rock Creek Park divides the city economically.

GIS Career Focus
While GIS is part of a broad technological emphasis at Washington's McKinley, in Louisville, Kentucky, it's the focus of one of 53 school-to-careers programs for secondary students. The impetus for the GIS career cluster came from a local businessman whose GIS firm could not find adequately prepared applicants. As a result, four of the city's 21 high schools now provide GIS training for 150 students.

The schools work with the University of Louisville GIS center, with which they have an articulation agreement. Doss High School has adopted a full four-year GIS program that includes GIS and spatial data courses, projects, and internships.

"Our dream is to not only get kids interested in GIS but to encourage them to pursue further education," says David Wicks, coordinator of the Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) Center for Environmental Education in Louisville. "Maybe they'll get interested in geography and geosciences or urban planning and zoning."

Working with local organizations, Wicks had initiated GIS community-based projects prior to the career program. For the past 10 years, students have worked with the Metropolitan Sewer District to identify downspouts that are illegally connected to the sanitary sewer system and help combat the problem of sewer overflows.

In another initiative, students walk county streams to log in pipes discharging into the water and assess water, flora, and fauna in the vicinity. They also map crimes and hazardous waste generators in school neighborhoods. This summer, four Central High School students are using CITYgreen to conduct a tree inventory of 50 school campuses as part of their required internships.

"Right now there are no characteristics, beyond aerial photographs, of Jefferson County's street tree level," says Wicks. "We don't know if a tree is an oak or a maple or if it's healthy."

Partnership for a Green City sponsored a GIS training workshop for the pilot project that Wicks would like to see eventually extended beyond the schoolyards. Next fall Central High students will use the CITYgreen data as "fodder for GIS classes," says Wicks. Additionally, students will produce interpretive lessons on urban forestry for elementary and middle schools.

Establishment of JCPS's GIS career path was a shift in focus for Wicks, who had tried for many years to get GIS adopted in the core curriculum. While he still advocates its use in academic courses, he finds more acceptance of the career approach.

Teacher Shawn canaday helps Chris Blevins with a project. The goal in Louisville is not just to have students learn GIS but to have them want to pursue higher education.

Real-world Connections
CITYgreen's capacity to enable students to make significant contributions to their communities is one of its strengths, says Bob Coulter, senior manager of the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, where he has integrated GIS into activities for both teachers and students.

"They're not just learning three interesting facts about trees but are learning how trees function in larger ecosystems and the real benefits of having a rich urban forest," says Coulter. "What really gets kids out of the passive receptacle mode is when they see learning as a valuable tool and not the standard science class cry of 'When am I ever going to use this?'"

An elementary math and science teacher for 12 years before joining the botanical garden in 1998, Coulter had used National Geographic's NGS Works to help students track eagle migrations. He conducts similar GIS programs now, engaging students in activities suited for their developmental levels.

Thus, high school students learn formal GIS, upper elementary classes use lower-level GIS and basic graphing tools, and younger students discover how collecting data helps them understand a topic. Many of the projects are seasonal investigations in which students return to Missouri Botanical Garden's ecology center several times during the school year to document changes in the environment. He also uses CITYgreen in the botanic garden's Mapping Urban Forests program.

Coulter is currently working with an all-girls high school that is looking at how GIS and map data can enhance the entire curriculum. For example, he says, "In social studies, GIS will give a new window on what is in the standard U.S. history text as they look at demographics, election cycles, and historical trends."

A Promising Future
Looking toward the future, Coulter anticipates that wireless technologies will help students integrate fieldwork more easily into their analyses. Admitting a fondness for such "techie tools," Coulter cautions schools against integrating GIS just to keep up with the technology.

"Significant educational change happens when schools are doing active investigations with real data, need a data tool to help them achieve their research goal, and then choose GIS," says Coulter. "The analogy is, you don't go to Home Depot and buy a hammer and then look for something to pound."

Malone also would like to see less hypothetical learning and more projects that take students out into the community to look at real issues. She acknowledges that the tension between performance learning and testing and assessment makes school systems leery of technology.

"It would be wonderful to have data that shows that students who learn in these hands-on, problem-solving ways perform just as well on math and science tests as those who are in more traditional classes," says Malone.

Wicks perceives a significant split over technology even among environmental educators, with some employing technological tools in their work and others preferring a more experiential approach to nature.

"Only about 10 percent actively use technology," he says, discounting such passive uses of technology as visiting websites. "The creation and manipulation of data is why I'm active in CITYgreen and GIS. When students are adding to the database, enthusiasm and dedication to learning occur." AF

Peggy Ann Brown is an independent researcher/writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.[TOP]