Empowering Ecological Education with Digital Mapping Tools

Managed by the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Litzsinger Road Ecology Center (LREC) is a beacon of growth for students in the Saint Louis, Missouri, metropolitan area. The 39-acre study center contains bottomland forest (a type of forested wetland, typically in low-lying areas near rivers or streams), restored prairie, and an urban creek. The center’s primary purpose is to engage teachers and students in place-based ecological education. Partnering with teachers and schools throughout the region, LREC hosts learning activities for students, teachers, volunteers, and graduate students. These activities include seasonal student visits to the LREC as well as professional development opportunities for teachers.

Dr. Bob Coulter, a former classroom teacher and the center’s director, has had a long commitment to educational innovation. In the late 1990s while he was still working in classrooms, he taught an elementary curriculum codeveloped by the Missouri Botanical Garden called What’s It Like Where You Live? As Coulter explained, “We want students to deepen their understanding of what’s outside of their window. For instance, how does the local temperature and precipitation enable certain plants and animals to survive? With this, how are the plants and animals adapted for these conditions? Equipped with these perspectives, students can compare local, distant, and future ecosystems.”
 

Coulter knew that the education landscape was changing quickly with advances in technology. To explore this, in 1998 he took a newly created position with the botanical garden to work with teachers and students to use geographic information system (GIS) software. He immediately saw how GIS offered more than just a technical skill for students. Rather, as Coulter noted, “Our work [supports] rich investigations, which are enhanced by the use of GIS and other modeling tools. We try to think of the learning opportunity first and then bring in the technology to extend it.”

When Coulter joined the Missouri Botanical Garden, he drew on his experience as a teacher to create GIS-enhanced projects and programs, starting with ArcMap and most recently using ArcGIS Online, included in the free ArcGIS for Schools Bundle, available for educators to use in K–12 instruction. As one example of a project LREC supported, Coulter told of how one teacher asked, “How do you engage kids in oceans when you’re in the middle of the country?” The teacher brought her students to the ecology center to do water testing, and from there, they were able to link the nitrate and phosphate levels measured in the local stream to the Gulf of America in the region downriver from Saint Louis.

Beyond his work with classroom teachers, Coulter continues to help students learn through GIS at what is affectionately now known as Bob Camp, a research and development space for 10–12 upper-elementary and middle school students each year. Over the course of a week together, students explore environmental issues around ecosystems, watersheds, and climate change.

In the past couple of years, Bob Camp students have explored concepts like the reintroduction of a plant species from seed bank samples and how herbarium samples from more than a century ago give evidence of climate change. Campers have also used the Watershed and Trace Downstream tools in ArcGIS Online to explore local watersheds. One surprising result of this work was how campers who live only two blocks from each other have very different water flow patterns. Hypothetical rubber duckies that floated away in a storm wouldn’t converge for nearly 25 miles.

A highlight from the summer 2024 Bob Camp was when students used Climate Mapping for Resilience & Adaptation data to test climate change predictions against actual data from the first nine years of the 2015–2045 change window. Campers found a small issue with how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was describing the data. “We pointed it out to them and they agreed” that the data was unclear, said Coulter. “Fifth graders’ understanding of very technical data is another illustration [of how] young kids can do some good thinking with GIS.”

In addition to Bob Camp, Coulter runs a statewide mapping contest that awards locally funded prizes to the top entries in elementary, middle, and high school grade divisions. Students are invited to explore a current issue and share their findings using ArcGIS StoryMaps. Not coincidentally, four of the campers from this past summer were previous map contest prize winners.

Much of Coulter's current work is in the pilot phase of revitalizing the What's It Like Where You Live? curriculum. He hopes to integrate additional tools like ArcGIS Hub so that the curriculum can be easily distributed. More generally, he sees an open future for geospatially enhanced learning. 

“There are many ways we can engage kids with the world and help them find it more intriguing. Through creative use of data and modeling tools integrated with GIS, we can put data on kids’ lived experience. We don’t just say, ‘Here’s the technology that you need to be a successful adult in the future,’ but rather, we want to help you explore how can you use the tools to make your world more interesting today. If we do that well, the kids will be very future ready.”