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?