Second Post

This is the second blog and the last one before I leave for my expedition. As we learned in class today from reading over the research overview, billions of people rely on trees and forests for shelter, fuel, medicines, stable soils, clean air and fresh water. It is vital that we protect our biodiversity because there are many resources in these forests that may have applications that are yet to be discovered. From the questions that I have been receiving from the students, I am excited to see that the students are thinking of questions that not only relate to the study that I will be doing, but also starting to think about solutions to these problems that we face. Beacuse of the large number of questions, I won't be able to answer all of them, but hopefully by communicating through this blog, I will be able to answer most of your questions. During this study, I will be in the Chesapeake Bay area to study the forest response to climate change. I will be working with some of the foremost forest scientists and institutions in the world at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to understand these forest processes. We will be researching the climate, tree response and animal responses using several different methods that we will be discussing in class before I leave. Since some of you had such good questions, I will leave you tonight with questions to answer from some of your fellow classmates:
1. How do scientists project future climate and how reliable are these predictions. (Thanks for the question Mhary)
2. Why is observing the forest important? (Thanks for the question Alex)
3. What exactly would happen if there were no forests in the world? (Thanks for the question Melvin)

And thanks for all of the good questions that many of you have been coming up with. Please make sure to follow along in my blog while I am away in Maryland. Enjoy. - Mr. Lewandowski

Hello and welcome to my blog about Climate Change and Forest sustainability. I am very privileged to have this great opportunity given to me by the Earthwatch program and HSBC. Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be writing about how scientists are able to monitor climate change and the effects that climate change has on the sustainability of forests. We have all heard about global warming in the news media and many of us ask ourselves, what can I possibly do to help this situation? My answer to this question was to join Earthwatch to find out how scientists are doing these studies and bring those lessons back to my students to figure out what we can do to help protect our environment. I am hoping that you will join my quest as I learn more about climate change and how that climate change is affecting our planet. Who knows, maybe this will inspire some of you to go out and become the engineers of the future who will be developing the technologies that will get us out of the predicament that we are now in. Perhaps we can envision a world where our fossil fuel use is minimal and instead we are using wind, wave, solar, geothermal or any of the other creative uses of renewable energy that your young minds may create. Because climate change is such a broad and challenging problem, I am hoping that we can begin to make a change by studying how this climate change is affecting forest sustainability and how forest managers may be able to help protect these forests with the studies that we do. Here are a few questions to some of my students that are related to lessons we have been discussing and the expedition I will be going on:
1. Why do you think it is important to monitor forests throughout our country?
2. What types of variables do you think would be necessary for a study such as this?
3. How do the scientists working on this project use the scientific method in order to solve this problem?