Abstract:

The need for environmental protection and the use and development of technology are key characteristics of the 21st century and are gaining more and more impact. Students must be prepared for qualified jobs, to make a living for themselves and to contribute to the needs and to the development of society. Mathematical modeling has become more and more important in order to understand correlations and feedback mechanisms, and to optimize progress, development, and environmental protection.

Among the necessary skills of future professionals are creativity, out-of-the-box-thinking, problem solving and the ability to know how to get acquainted with new terrain and new technologies. All these are characteristics of doing research, and therefore teaching how to research has been brought forward to earlier phases of education. In this workshop we will show a research project that has been developed for students at Achva Academic College. During this project students will learn to choose interesting and freely accessible data of animal tracking from the internet, to download and analyze this data and to correlate it with data from weather stations around the world. As a follow-up, the impact of environmental changes on animal movement can be discussed.

In a preliminary phase students might need a refresher lesson in geographical coordinates. This can be done by showing short videos and then training with with applets that can be found on the internet (e.g. among Geogebra classroom resources).

Movebank is an online platform for storing and sharing animal tracking data. Among the sensor types are classical ones such as bird rings, and modern ones such as radio transmitters and GPS. The project started in 2007. Some of the data is freely accessible. Each group of data collecting researchers decides if, or under which conditions to share their data.

We will give a short introduction to bird migration, how GPS data of migrating storks can be collected, and to the limits of such techniques.

Movebank permits users to visualize tracking data on a map. On the map, animal paths appear without the corresponding times. In cases where animals show unusual behavior such as suddenly changing their route, the respective data can be downloaded for further analysis with spreadsheet programs, and for finding the corresponding time stamps. Once the date of unusual behavior has been established, we suggest accessing data of nearby weather stations in order to check for possible correlations.

We will also mention and try to find data sets that demonstrate that during recent years birds, which were originally migrating from Northern Europe to Africa, remained during winter in stop over places like Spain instead of continuing to Africa.

In summary, a combination of Movebank data, spreadsheet programs and data from weather stations around the world, enable students to do research with a variety of digital tools and to that way study the complexity of environmental changes.

Keywords:

Technology, Mathematics, environmental conditions, animal tracking, digital tools.