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PEARL home page gets new look… and new features
PEARL’s home page (http://www.pearl.maine.edu) has been re-designed to provide a clearer picture of what types of information can be found in the various sections of the site. The new home page also introduces a new feature: the PEARL User Guide. In this Guide, you will find tips for using PEARL – simple directions for finding specific types of information and utilities. For example, lake overviews for any lake you select, on-the-fly graphs of lake water transparency, fish species distribution maps, information on aquatic plants, and so on. The User Guide will continue to expand in the future as more tips are added. We encourage input from PEARL users! If you have any tips you would like to see added to the User Guide, please send them to PEARL@maine.edu.
At the top of the new home page we can find examples of data sets that have been newly added or updated in PEARL. You can also view these updates in the “PEARL Updates” section of the User Guide – along with the series of Frequently Asked Questions.
Refresh your screen… and often!
Your computer probably “remembers” copies of Web pages previously accessed. Because some PEARL pages are frequently updated, you should refresh your screen to make sure that you are seeing the most up-to-date version of PEARL pages. Check the Browser Advisory on the PEARL home page for more information.
Environmental Organizations in Maine
We are collaborating with Gayle Zydlewski (Cove Brook Watershed Council and UMaine) and other faculty members at UMaine to develop a list of NGOs and other environmental organizations in Maine – and then indexing these organizations by watershed. If you are associated with one of these organizations, check to see if the organization is in our current list. If it is not in this list, please let us know (pearl@maine.edu) and tell us where your organization is working!
Using PEARL Data to Enhance Student Learning
The following article was submitted for publication in PEARL News by Rex Turner, Director of Education, Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute.
As an environmental educator, it is vital to have access to quality natural resource information and data. Trustworthy information sources serve as fact-checking tools as well as wellsprings of inspiration. PEARL is a tremendous example of one such reliable, deep source of knowledge.
PEARL goes beyond being useful to just educators. With its wealth of easily accessible on-line data, it is a resource for students as well. In our educational efforts at the Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute (MLCI), we’ve found that middle school students (who, through the Maine Laptop Initiative program all have individual laptops in the classroom) can use the PEARL site to uncover knowledge in a more active process than simply being told, for example, whether an emerald shiner is native to Maine or not.
This school year, PEARL is especially central to MLCI’s partner school programs. For one, we will use print outs of average secchi disk readings and lake depth maps during our spring floating classroom programs which occur on lakes local to our schools. On the ice this winter, printed PEARL fish species lists for the lake being studied (and fished) are used to show the total diversity of fish species in the lake or pond. This information, coupled with the experience of ice fishing with live bait, naturally brings up a chance to discuss why it is illegal to dump your leftover bait into an ice hole. This, in turn, leads to a more conceptual examination of the idea of biodiversity.
There is also a deeper student interaction with PEARL happening in the classroom. After a prior day of fish related activities occurring either in the classroom or out on the ice, students are asked to work with their laptops in small groups. They use PEARL to discover what fish species found in one of their local lakes are non-native. Students perform searches within PEARL and use several pages of data to identify the species present in their pond as well as which of those species are not originally native to Maine. After that information is collected, students collaborate to produce one digital map that graphically depicts which non-native fish are found in various local lakes and ponds. This map is then posted on MLCI’s Students’ Portal, a portion of our website showcasing work done by and information about our partner schools. To view sample maps, visit http://www.mlci.org/Students/default.aspx and look under the fish icon at schools such as Litchfield, Lincolnville, Vassalboro, and Skowhegan (more posted soon as well).
What’s great about using PEARL for this project is that it helps us make the lesson local and personalized to the students we work with. This lesson could work using a hypothetical lake or one major lake such as Sebago, Cobbossee, etc. What would be lost, though, is the element of community and place. Students are able to research something they have a relationship with. They fish in these ponds, they swim in them, and they know what they mean to their friends, their families, and themselves. This creates enormous buy-in to the learning.
PEARL is helping the Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute educate Maine’s youth. As it continues its growth, so grows its potential to educate Mainers of all ages about the invaluable resource our freshwater is. As we at MLCI continue to promote understanding and appreciation of Maine’s lakes and ponds in an effort to foster stewardship, we will continue to value the great work that goes into PEARL. It is work that pays off!
Rex Turner
Director of Education
Maine Lakes Conservancy Institute
Frequently-Asked Questions
How can I evaluate the quality of the different data sets in PEARL?
Our policy is to add data to PEARL only if these data appear to be of reputable quality and if they are supported by metadata (information about how the data were collected, field sampling protocols, analytical methodologies, etc.). Nevertheless, PEARL data sets are not uniform. They come from studies with different designs, different questions that were addressed and different levels of “sophistication”. The metadata contain the key information that is needed to be able to fully interpret the data themselves. Click on the “About the Data” button at the top of each data table. For additional information, you should always consult the data provider and/or the reference(s) indicated in the metadata.
Some of the lake water quality data tables include a “station” field. How can I find out where each station is located in the lake?
Open the lake’s depth map from the Lake Overview and Data Access page. These bathymetric maps generally include the location(s) of the sampling station(s). Note that we are currently working with DEP to re-design their lake water quality narratives. The re-designed narratives will include an index map that shows the sampling stations, in addition to providing a direct link to the full bathymetric map.
For questions, comments or more information about PEARL, contact PEARL@maine.edu.
Data Additions
Wild & native brook & lake trout populations (First upload 2/07)
Downeast rivers temperature data: Daily averages (Updated 2/07)
Kenduskeag water quality (First upload 1/07)
Acadia "bioblitz" surveys (First upload 9/06)
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