Using Data to Identify Hot Spots and Predict Bleaching Events

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In this EarthLabs activity, learners explore the concepts of coral bleaching, bleaching hot spots and degree-heating weeks. Using data products from NOAA's Coral Reef Watch, students identify bleaching hot spots and degree-heating weeks around the globe as well as in the Florida Keys' Sombrero Reef to determine the impact higher-than-normal sea surface temperatures have on coral reefs.

HS-LS2-6 Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.

Analyze data using tools, technologies, and/or models (e.g., computational, mathematical) in order to make valid and reliable scientific claims or determine an optimal design solution.

Ask questions to determine relationships, including quantitative relationships, between independent and dependent variables.

Construct and revise an explanation based on valid and reliable evidence obtained from a variety of sources (including students’ own investigations, models, theories, simulations, peer review) and the assumption that theories and laws that describe the natural world operate today as they did in the past and will continue to do so in the future.

Develop, revise, and/or use a model based on evidence to illustrate and/or predict the relationships between systems or between components of a system.

Compare, integrate and evaluate sources of information presented in different media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as well as in words in order to address a scientific question or solve a problem.

Make directional hypotheses that specify what happens to a dependent variable when an independent variable is manipulated.

Empirical evidence is required to differentiate between cause and correlation and make claims about specific causes and effects.

Different patterns may be observed at each of the scales at which a system is studied and can provide evidence for causality in explanations of phenomena.

When investigating or describing a system, the boundaries and initial conditions of the system need to be defined and their inputs and outputs analyzed and described using models.

The significance of a phenomenon is dependent on the scale, proportion, and quantity at which it occurs.

Change and rates of change can be quantified and modeled over very short or very long periods of time. Some system changes are irreversible.

Using Data to Identify Hot Spots and Predict Bleaching Events

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Science and Engineering Practices

Crosscutting Concepts