Tag Archives: change over time

Greetings from Camp Landsat: Cities and Suburbs

By Activity, Education, Environmental Change, Landsat, NASA, Observation, Outreach, Remote Sensing, , , , , , , , , , ,

Greetings from Camp Landsat!

Postcards From Camp: Cities & Suburbs
Are you exploring any cities this summer? Rain or shine, urban planners use Landsat to take stock of city growth and its environmental impact. The front of this postcard features a natural-color Landsat 8 image of Ocean Flower Island in Hainan, China acquired May 6, 2020.

This week’s camp theme is Cities and Suburbs and focuses on the growth of cities and urban areas as seen over time through Landsat images. Urban growth has impacts on the surrounding environment. Visit Camp Landsat to learn more and experience a time-laspse video of urban growth in Qatar, a storymap about urbanization of vacation towns, and learn about urban heat islands in Minnesota. This week’s camp crafts include Color by Number Image Classification and creating a bird house with a “green roof.” Thank you to our friends at NASA for making this fun summer camp possible!

IowaView Rendezvous at Spirits in the Gardens

By Activity, Education, Event, Outreach, USGS, , , , , ,

On November 1st, IowaView staff participated the “meet-a-scientist” at the annual Reiman Gardens Spirits in the Gardens event featuring a self guided pathway with hundreds of carved pumpkins as well as scientists to meet along the way. During our shift, there were over 250 visitors of all ages. We were able to share posters featuring remote sensing and GIS, which included aerial imagery of Ames and Reiman Gardens dating from the 1930s to 2019. Participants enjoyed seeing change over time as Ames has urbanize over the last ninety years. Staff gave out goodie bags with AmericaView poster, USGS trading cards, and Earth as Art bookmarks and booklets.

USGS Earthshots: Satellite Images of Environmental Change

By Activity, Article, Education, Imagery, Lesson Plan, Observation, Outreach, Resource, , , , ,

The USGS has produced an amazing collection of images (also available as trading cards!) that show Earth’s change over time. The Earthshot collection has a wide variety of examples of change over time including:
– natural phenomena changes (glaciers, deserts,)
– social change (city growth,)
– human interaction with the natural world (mining, deforestation, agriculture,)
– natural disasters (hurricanes, tornado damage, flooding.)

Below are two examples of the trading cards, Mount St. Helens pre/post volcanic explosion and Las Vegas, Nevada population growth over time.

The cards provide side by side comparison images and also context about the images on the opposite side including information about the date of the images, satellites, bands used to create the images and location data.

If you view a location on through the browser you will get about 5 images you can review as well as context about the images.

Other Resources: Tracking Change Over Time (teacher guide): https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/133/pdf/tracking-packet_web.pdf
Lesson Plan – Investigating Deforestation Throught An Earth Systems View Using Landsat: https://mynasadata.larc.nasa.gov/lesson-plans/investigating-deforestation-through-earth-systems-view-using-landsat

IowaView has trading cards available. Please contact Amy Logan for more information.