In this collaborative project with National Geographic and American Forests we plan to to develop through funding by Boston College’s Academic Technology Innovation Grant a web-based version of American Forests’ popular CITYgreen software integrated into National Geographic’s Fieldscope GIS application.
This new educational tool will allow students to import a satellite image of their study area and then label the features of that image with their appropriate characteristics. For example, a student will be able label all buildings in their study site as a building, a park as green space, a parking lot or a road as impervious surfaces, and label trees in their study site. Once the students have labeled their satellite image (study site) then they will be able run a computational model analysis of their site to determine the ecological and economic impact of the available green space.
We envision students will be able to evaluate the amount of air quality improvement, storm water runoff, and impact on temperature around their study site. Then once the students have a baseline analysis they will be able to re-design their study site and convert (re-label) areas of their study site to be either more green space or more urbanized spaces such as building, parking lots, or roadways and re-run the computer model. As a result we will be able to engage students in urban design with a focus on evaluation of the impact of green space on an area. This will allow students to quickly evaluate the impact of how land is used in urban areas and to better understand the relationships between land use and ecological variables such as air quality.
The software that we propose will not only be useful for urban design but will enable to students to explore several other difficult to understand scientific concepts such as habitat fragmentation in urban areas (i.e. a student will be able to ask “Is it possible for a butterfly to make it from one green island to another in the city because if it can’t its ability to survive in the city is rather limited), the impact of green space on electricity usage. However, perhaps the most important contribution of this work will be the development of an easy to use Geographic Information System technology which according to the National Resource Council (2006)
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