Students Use Technology to Support Environmental Restoration
Earth Science s (EARThS) are currently using the Xplorer GLX© graphing data logger from PASCO to collect data in the Santa Monica Mountains as part of the Students Helping to Restore Unique Biomes or SHRUBS program.
The SHRUBS program provides opportunities for students to work directly with 
National Park Rangers from the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area to help restore an area of the park that was once home to the Chumash village known as Satwiwa back to its natural habitat. The students learn about the native plants, geology and animal life of the area well as principals of habitat restoration such as reseeding techniques. The students spend one day a month in the field and use the Xplorer GLX units to record weather statistics and the GPS location of their study area. If there is water present, students use the GLX units to test the quality of the water by measuring things such as pH and dissolved oxygen levels.
Students record the data gathered from these field trips in notebooks and plan to input the data into a Geographic Information System call My World GIS (also from PASCO), which will allow them to “see” or visualize the data. If you have ever used Google Earth or have a GPS unit in your car you have had experience “seeing” data.
In addition to the SHRUBS project, students at EARThS used the GLX units for water testing and mapping on campus. Students are using this information to map areas of the campus, and will be using the data to create a scale model of the 5th grade BioLab.
The students have become experts on the use of the GLX units for collecting all types of data. A group of 6 student experts were originally trained by the Ventura County Office of Education (which provides access to the GLX units) in the use of the GLX units and associated probes. Those original 6 successful trained all of their 54 5th grade peers to use the units. The next step will be to train the park rangers!
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