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Students answer the driving question: How do we measure chemical weathering?

Students answer the driving question: Where do we find evidence of weathering, erosion, and deposition in the local environment?

Students answer the driving question: Where does the moving material go?

Students answer the driving question: What happens to dissolved minerals?

Teaching about the water cycle can be made more realistic and valuable for students by incorporating what they know about water-where it comes from, what happens to it after they use it, and what problems are associated with its use. When students study watersheds, they learn in a personal way about the importance of water, and how land use affects surface and groundwater.

Incorporating secondary data into ecology can provide students with a way of supporting their claims from smaller research projects and connecting their work with the real world. In addition to providing units that include secondary data, these materials also highlight the ecological nature of science by providing lessons that focus on key habits of mind to help students think like an ecologist.

When people think of ecology, they usually imagine studies out in the country. The next thing they think of is studies involving the relationship of plants and animals to one another. They also imagine studies that show how organisms relate to the physical environment -- air, water, and soil. People and cities usually don't come to mind when ecology is mentioned.

Thinking about the flow of matter and energy with students is one of the key ways of exploring ecosystems. In these lessons, students construct their own understanding of ecosystems through investigations in their schoolyard, developing ideas about ecological processes and functions

The incredible wealth of diversity on our planet is something to be celebrated with students of all ages! Any place is an ecosystem, and biodiversity studies can take place in a forest, stream, pond, or even cracks of the sidewalk.

This is a collection of lessons from the Hudson Valley Ecosystem that allow students to explore different aspects of their local environment by analyzing and interpreting data. In these activities, students work with datasets in a scaffolded format to learn more about their local ecosystem and increase their confidence and skill in working with data.

This unit aims to increase students understanding of schoolyard tree biodiversity, and engage students in thinking about local forests as dynamic, exciting systems. The curriculum also encourages students to develop and test claims comparing different forest types.

Hydrofracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is a gas production technique where the natural gas is extracted from rock deep underground using a cocktail of water and chemicals (fracking fluid), injected with high pressure.  There are a number of ecological concerns related to this practice, including an increase in turbidity due to infrastructure development for the wells and reduced streamflow due to water withdrawals for the fracking process.  In this unit, students explore how fracking might affect turbidity levels using secondary data from streams in Arkansas and a first-hand investigation on turbidity in a pond microcosm.

The Hudson River has one of the highest levels of PCB pollution of any river on the East Coast. In this module, students will learn about the history of PCB's in the Hudson, how PCB's get into the fish we eat, and what has been done to remove PCB's from the Hudson River. Students will also gain experience analyzing data by exploring how levels of PCB's vary over time, location, and between different species of fish. There are separate versions of the lessons that are appropriate for middle school and high school students.

Hydrofracking is a gas production technique where the natural gas is extracted from rock deep underground using a cocktail of water and chemicals (fracking fluid), injected with high pressure.  Students explore the effects of hydrofracking using secondary data and first-hand investigations designed to help them understand how salt pollution impacts ecosystems function.    

The Cary Institute has been involved in a long-term study to monitor the increase of sodium chloride in our local stream over the last 25 years.  While sodium is less of a problem for organisms, chloride can be more harmful.

Freshwater tidal wetlands are a unique ecosystem of the Hudson River estuary, and these lessons will help students understand their importance along with some of the challenges due to a changing climate. 

In order to help students understand the connections between water and air pollution through the concept of watersheds and airsheds, as well as understand the impacts of their decisions on human health and the environment, we have developed a game that allows middle and high school students to become decision makers in a hypothetical county.

The Stream Ecology Unit (YES-Net) enlists students as scientists as they collect data on the numbers and kinds of aquatic insects found in local streams. This unit is unique in that it focuses on collecting long term data about the changes in the populations of macroinvertebrates.  Students gain skills in field work and identification of these critters and have the opportunity to explore and interpret trends in their data as well as data collected by others.  In addition, the field trip is surrounded by classroom lessons that teach key concepts such as the effect of abiotic and biotic factors on stream ecosystems, food webs, and data analysis and exploration.

How do populations change in the Hudson River ecosystem, and how do these changes affect the larger ecological community? Using video, data, and hands-on investigations, students will explore how food webs and the abiotic resources and conditions of the ecosystem have changed in response to the zebra mussel invasion. This case study allows students to understand community level changes, which they can then apply to other systems.  

This unit integrates ecology and evolution by focusing on the story of Foundry Cove, where thousands of pounds of cadmium waste were dumped from the 1950s through 1970s.