This grant funded work for the Neotoma Paleoecological Database which contains information on sites in North America that provide proxy data (pollen, insects, vertebrates, isotopes, etc.) for recosntructing environments and climates for the last 5 million years. The database allows for the integration of these proxies in order to create past ecosystem recontructions which show the relationships between plants, animals and climates. Thes reconstructions are critical for understanding how organisms responded to climate change in the past. Hence, they can also be useful in modeling and testing models for biotic response to future climate change. However, the graetest importance of these execises is that they allow partcipants to work with real scientific data and understand how scientists develop hypotheses and test them.

This project is interdisciplinary with a host of universites and researchers doing a variety of different tasks. The PSU component of the grant involves programming for the web page which is the primary route to the database. To facilitate use of the database by professional scientists, school groups and lay people, a search engine known as EXPLORER has been developed. Programmers at PSU have been involved in other aspects of the database, as well, including the migration of the database to a new platform.

In addition, PSU has been responsoible for developing educational materials that can be used for people interested in using the database or learning more about how climate change impacts the geographic distribution of species. To this end, scientists at PSU developed a seven module education program that is hosted on the Science Education Resource Cernter (SERC) at Carleton College (https://serc.carleton.edu/index.html). Each module is designed to stand alone and they build on each other. The first six modules introduce the viewer to ideas about climate change, ecology, paleoecology, biogeography, etc. All of these modules have exercises and test questions to make sure that the participant understands the material being presented, The last module has the participant use the Neotoma Paleoecological Database to establish hypotheses about how mammal species have responded to climate change in the past based upon the indepently derived climate reconstructions from ice cores. The partcipant then queries the database to test their hypothesis. At the end, the participant then uses the information from the past to make inferences about what will happen in the future.

The Neotoma Paleoecological Database has also been employed in classes for beginning students in science education. Lectures provided background information about climate change, paleoecology and the Neotoma Database. The students then designed a class using Neotoma that allowed students to make predictions about how specific mammal species might respond to climate change. The predictions were based upon the modern distribution of the species and its control by modern climate. These hypotheses were then tested by observing changes in species distributions through time using Neotoma. Ice core data determined climate parameters for varying times in the past. The university students then took their exercise to two fifth grade classrooms in State College and had the grade school students work through it. The experiment was a great success for both the university students as well as the fifth graders.

The Neotoma Database was the focus for a teacher's workshop at PSU. The topic of the workshop was "Biotic Response to Climate Change: Past, Present and Future." This workshop was in conjunction with the Center for Science in the Schools in the College of Education at PSU. The workshop followed a pattern similar to the ones described above and it was designed to meet specific state standards in education.

Last Modified: 01/18/2019
Modified by: Russell W Graham