LUQ Information Management Project

LUQ Information Management and Remote Sensing Project

Colegio Creativo de Puerto Rico

A Community´s private elementary school (pre-school to 6^th grade levels)

located at Ave. Guaracanal, Rio Piedras Puerto Rico.

Motivation:

Activities. Last September 9, 2002, the science and mathematic teacher (Mrs. Amarilis Rodríguez of this school gathered all her 6^th graders and spend this Saturday morning indentifying all the trees that has been planted by the administration of the school since they moved to the premises 5 years ago (Summer 1997). The agronomist Nancy Laboy, from the Jardín Botánico at Caguas was in charge of the activity.

A total of eighty three (83) trees were identified (all there are) regardless of their height and/or diameter. At that moment alluminium tags where prepared (numbered as 001 to 083) and nailed on the trees. All students, teachers, and some parents took part in this activity. All students and teachers were taking notes as the trees were identified by the agronomist by their common name.

As I was one of the parents participating in the activity I decided to make a map of the location of the site, to facilitate to the teacher the following activity which they had as a next step, which is to place a sign which will containthe following information: the tag number assigned, the common name, and the scientific name. Previous to that activity they plan to make a list of all the trees with the common and scientific names and the origin of the trees.

The agronomist was very pleased to learn that I had done a map and suggested to make a real map out of it.

Nature of the trees. The trees identified come from different places. Some are exotic species from Africa, others exists in other parts of the Caribbean, and others are endemic. It is worth mentioning that the agronomist was really thrilled when she identified a palm (which were not part of inventory) that is worth more than $1000 in the market. She promised to send them three others plants: one endangered species, one endemic from Puerto Rico (whose common name is Coala negro), and another from Europe (granada).

Proposal:

Goals. To enter all the data and documentation possible, such that a database is crerated that will be updated each year by every 6^th Grade.

Introduce the teacher and student to the work done by our LTER site. I will coordinate with the teacher a brief talk (one hour the most) in which I will present the class the work done by ecologists throughout the world and at our site as part of the LTER program. The concepts of preserving, sharing, including documenting long-term data, and doing scientific team work in will be emphasized here. Also, an introduction to the use of an instrument to take global positioning and Remote Sensing work will be presented by John Thomlinson.

Assist the teacher and student to prepare a data base (along with its documentation) for their collected data. This will include all the data gathered plus the scientific name, the origin and the location of the tree within the promises. Teacher and students will be teached to use QPRO spreadsheet (they do not have MS Office in their computers) as a data entry tool for their data. The documentation will be simple and will only contain the basic metadata elements that the LTER Information Managers across the Network have identified as essential.

After they have entered all the data I can convert the data base into an Access data set, ready for sharing and searching. Only the teacher will be trained in the use of ACCESS.

Complete the data base with the location, height, and DBH of each tree (proposed by John Thomlinson). Get the global positioning of each of the individual trees, along with their global position using a GPS. Only the teacher and children will be involved in this activity, and I will participate as an assistant to John Thomlinson and I will document the event.

Prepare a GIS layer with the spatial data and part of the data gathered. I will be in charged of this part and Thomlinson will be my mentor in learning the essentials of GIS, and the use of ArcView in order to enter prepare this layer. I will have to learn a lot of concepts so this phase will require more time. The details about the layers will be discussed and decided about later on, after the previous activities are completed.

Resources Needed:

Time for the Information Manager to coordinate with teacher and teach her and the other teacher in charge (Mr Wilfredo Damiani) of computer in the use of Excel and Access. Estimated time needed for this: two afternoons.

Time to give a talk to the children and to take the locations and measurements of the trees discussed above. Estimated time for this: and afternoon.

GPS instrument. Provided by Remote Sensing Lab (John Thomlinson).

Time for the Information Manager to learn GIS, and the use of ArcView, and for preparing the GIS layer of the location of the trees. Estimated time for this: unknown for the moment.