Crossing Boundaries

"Disappearing Forests of the World" Google Earth Layer

The magic of Google Earth lies in its power to both “open… up the world to [our] students” (Jim Murphy, 8th Grade Science Teacher) and serve as a tool for “highlighting and visualizing environmental issues” (David Tryse, Google Earth Layer Developer). It seems like almost everyone has some reason for loving Google Earth. One of the reasons I like Google Earth is that there is never a lack of new layers and placemarkers to explore.

For example, check out “Disappearing Forests of the World.” This 3-D Google Earth layer illustrates, in a pretty dramatic way, deforestation throughout our world. When you click on a place marker for an individual country, up pops a pie chart of forested and deforested land alongside a short list of facts. Fly on down to Brazil and you can easily see that the country has lost a little over 8% of its forest cover between 1990 and 2005 with a grand total of over a third of all of its original forests gone. So, take a spin around the globe and start exploring both home and abroad! (This dataset is from the World Resources Institute, Greenpeace, and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization).

EDGE Species Layer in Google Earth

The same developer of “Disappearing Forests of the World,” David Tryse, has been busy creating other fascinating and eye popping layers as well. There’s one on Conservation International’s 34 Biodiversity Hotspots around the world that summarize the region’s local biodiversity, habitat, and threats. You can also hop around the world examining Evolutionary Distinct and Globally Endangered, “EDGE,” mammals and amphibians. After pursuing these unique species, add the 50 largest oil spills to your Google Earth map to see learn about the ensuing environmental degradation. And how about just for fun, visualize the “total volume of all water on earth, as if collected into a single sphere.” Sound strange? Download “All the Water in the World” and see it for yourself!

Until next time, happy Google Earth-ing!

Wildlife galore!

We’re home from Kenya after a mind-boggling week. The question of how to inspire students to care about local and global environments framed our travels, along with the question of how to help US students relate ecological issues in their home communities to similar issues in a remote and exotic setting they likely will never visit. Traveling with middle school teacher Scott Krebbeks and high school teacher Michelle Watkins helped to frame everything we saw in terms of how to capture these experiences for US students.

Warthog

In Crossing Boundaries, we are working to produce curriculum resources through which U.S. students will learn science while analyzing biodiversity issues in their own communities and in several international settings. We aim to increase students’ awareness of their role as global citizens and the ways in which they can use technology to analyze resource issues, evaluate management options, make cross-cultural comparisons, and communicate with scientists working in other countries.

At Mpala, with Wilson as our guide

We were fortunate to arrive in Kenya shortly after the end of the unprecedented drought that has afflicted the region over the past 14 months. Rains had begun, and we were fascinated to watch day by day as brown turned to green and the savannah took on new signs of life. Throughout the week, we interviewed a variety of scientists, managers, and conservation specialists in the Laikepia region, which is known for its spectacular wildlife intermingled with nomadic herders and subsistence farming communities. We were excited to have the opportunity to view wildlife and meet with scientists and managers at Mpala Research Center and the Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

Huts used by nomadic herdsmen, who stay by their livestock night and day to protect from lions and other predators

We’re trying to wrap our minds around how to produce a curriculum that will inspire U.S. students to care about their local environment and to see connections to remote and exotic environments — not a simple task! Dr. Anthony King, Executive Dirctor of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, eloquently encapsulated the issue by describing the human body as a couple of pails of water and a handful of dirt — starkly illustrating our need to sustain an environment with healthy water and soil resources. The Forum views humans as an integral component of healthy ecosystems, and it aims to conserve the integrity of the Laikipia ecosystem by creatively managing natural resources to improve the livelihood of its people. Sound wildlife and environmental management are recognized as key factors in improving the livelihoods of local communities, where the average income is literally pennies per day.

Overgrazed community lands contrast with the greener managed lands

In our travels, we viewed the “tragedy of the commons” on community lands where the drought had left little choice but overgrazing so stark that the ground was bare, with soils rapidly eroding. We also viewed creative management in action, with scientists and managers collaborating to create and implement strategies for cattle grazing that can actually improve the environment for wildlife. Ongoing efforts to balance the needs of impoverished local communities, nomadic herders, and world-renowned wildlife gave us a view of organizations that are actively applying the “triple bottom line” framework, aiming not only for profit but also to create and sustain healthy human communities and the environment needed to support all life.

A hard way to transport a load

Kenya is a land of extreme contrasts: rich and poor, urban and rural, drought and rain. Peoples’ lives are directly dependent on natural resources, and living so close to the land gives them no cushion for tough times.
We were inspired by efforts underway in the Laipikia region to create a sustainable future for people and wildlife. Now that we’re home, we’ll begin figuring out how to translate our life-changing experiences in Kenya into curriculum resources that we hope will inspire and motivate students in New York. Stay tuned!

Manure in the boma

We are extremely privileged to be meeting with some great people who are without a doubt helping to turn the wheels of curriculum development. Let’s start with Carolyn. Carolyn works in the ecological monitoring department of Ol Pejeta. She gave us a super informative presentation on the work being done at Ol Pejeta. She talked about wildlife surveys conducted, bomas, strategic burning of the land, and the integration of cattle and wildlife. At the conclusion of her talk she introduced us to Methenge, Ol Pejeta’s cattle operations manager.

Methenge truly gave us the insider’s look at cattle ranching at Ol Pejeta. We learned quite a bit about how Ol Pejeta is using cattle to create hotspots for wildlife while still maintaining a successful cattle business. We even were able to drive to a few bomas to literally put our feet in the manure and look around.

Modern metal boma.

The icing on the cake came with a meeting with Anthony King, director of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, which has its office in a small building at the Nanyuki airstrip. Here’s what Scott had to say about our adventures at the airstrip, “to say the least, Anthony was inspirational. He had a simple, yet profound definition of what he thinks conservation is, and was pleased to hear about our work on this trip. We spoke with him for about two hours, then Jim surprised us with a flight in a single-engine plane over the area that we’ve been exploring and learning about for the past week. Our flight was about an hour, and it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Kirin, our pilot, would ask where we wanted to go as we were in the air. If we wanted to circle above a working boma, we just asked him and he took us there. It was amazing!”

Tomorrow, we have a meeting in Nairobi with Peter Ndunda, the GIS technical specialist for the Greenbelt Movement. We are looking forward to our meeting with Peter!

View from the plane of small-scale agriculture

We left Mpala Research Centre this morning and drove to the nearby city of Nanyuki to load up on diesel fuel before heading North to Ol Pejeta Conservancy, our home for the next few days.

Cattle and elephants in harmony. (http://www.olpejetaconservancy.org)

Ol Pejeta Conservancy is a 90,000 acre wildlife conservancy and cattle ranch. At first it might seem weird that a wildlife conservancy is combining cows with elephants, zebra, giraffe, lions, etc. But,  at Ol Pejeta the controlled grazing of cattle has actually increased wildlife population.  Apparently, “grassland areas left entirely to wildlife often become rank, which prevents new growth of nutritious grass and reduces the overall carrying capacity of the range (for all herbivores, cattle and wildlife)”  (www.olpejeta.org). We also learned that the cattle-wildlife combo helps the bottom-line. Wildlife (i.e. eco-tourism) and cattle (i.e. selling cows) combined together increase overall profit per acre. In fact, when Ol Pejeta keep wildlife on one side of the fence and cattle on the other, prior to 2004, annual profits were a mere $0.60 per acre for cattle and $8 an acre for wildlife, but when cattle and wildlife were integrated annual profits per acre soared to $11.20 per acre. Talk about an increase. According to Ol Pejeta, “an integrated system of cattle production and tourism provides more income and better margins than an ‘either, or’ situation. ” They also credit their integrated system with increasing employment and reducing risk to business in times of poor tourism. Ol Pejeta is, simply put, using cattle  as a tool to conserve wildlife.

After we were settled in to our tents at Ol Pejeta’s Sweetwater tents and had lunch, we took the Land Rover out for a drive to find and view wildlife. Scott says that ” every waking moment that we’re not working or eating, we’re driving around looking for birds and mammals.” And he is pretty much right! We are adding to our bird and mammal list every waking moment.

Our adventures in Kenya continue to be exciting as we spot galloping giraffes, gorgeous Lilac Breasted Rollers, and elusive lions. However, we are also packing in many group discussions about possible directions for the Kenya curriculum modules. Here’s what Michelle, one of our Crossing Boundaries teachers, had to say:

Michelle looking through her binos

“This experience is beyond words and the ideas that it has generated are deep and wide.  As we have traveled through the Mpala Research Center, we’re sighting incredible biodiversity at every turn.  I’m struggling to express the ‘wow factor’ that’s part of seeing every species that’s new to us!  This enthusiasm is so contagious and we can’t wait to share it!

“ I can’t  wait to see  how the Crossing  Boundaries  Kenya based curriculum  modules come together.  Being here is so inspiring and we’ve shared great conversations about possibilities for integrating these experiences in many dimensions of the Crossing Boundaries curriculum.  Now the challenge is to engage students in transforming ways in the tradition of Wangari Maathai.”

We woke up this morning to a revived and reinvigorated savannah.  It’s amazing to see how a good rain can transform the Kenyan savannah.  Brown is turning into green, the bone-dry river has begun to flow, and birds have begun their mating song and dance. We are seeing these changes happen before our very eyes. We are told that if we would have come even a week earlier it would have been a very different situation.

After breakfast, we walked around the Mpala Research Station with Wilson  to visit various superb starling nesting sites that he is studying with Dustin Rubenstein, a professor at Columbia University. Superb Starlings are everywhere and they are quite a pretty bird. Dustin’s research is showing that the birds seem to prefer nesting near glades, the nutrient rich areas created by bomas. These glades are providing the Superb Starling with a superb array of tasty grasshoppers.

Superb Starling on an acacia

After checking out the Superb Starling nests at the Research Station we ventured to other nesting sites at Mpala and continued to chat with Wilson about the important ecological role that glades play at Mpala. It’s quite interesting because these glades are providing tangible benefits for both livestock and wildlife. Talk about a win-win situation. The livestock are protected from predators and the wildlife receive green grass to eat and sleep on as the successional grasses return.

Of course, you can’t go boma hunting without seeing tons of wildlife, both small and large. Along our way, we saw Rhinoceros… Dung Beetles rolling cow patties to prepare their eggs, hundreds of marching ants carrying a termite each back to their subterranean colony, and, drum roll please, we finally saw elephants! It was about time, I’d have to say. We have seen nothing but evidence of elephants: acacia trees with stripped bark and crushed to no end,  footprints, and the obligatory piles of dung. It was almost as if the elephants were mocking us by just letting us see their footprints and poop, but we were all literally jumping out of seats when Wilson spotted Elephants down in a ravine.

Wilson has an amazing gift for sharing his vast amount of knowledge with us from wildlife sightings to insights about the landscape. He also has incredible patience as we shout, “wait, where is the Elephant, again?”  (It’s amazing how well a huge Elephant can blend in, trust me).  In fact, Wilson is even taking his excitement and talent beyond the boundaries of the Mpala Research Center by creating conservation clubs at four local elementary schools. We were lucky enough to go and visit one of the clubs after lunch and watch the students gain knowledge and awareness of the critical role biodiversity plays in their big backyard. In a small cement block classroom, about thirty 4^th and 5^th graders eagerly answered questions about the importance of birds in their local ecosystem during a short lesson. Afterward, the children went out to search for birds, evidence of birds, and examples of bird behavior.  The children were also excited when they learned that we had collected donated books and school supplies for them. (We held a couple book drives at our schools and work places for donated books and have been blown away by the generosity of our students and colleagues).

At dinner Scott reflected on our visit to the school, “[it was] an eye opening experience. I don’t think our students have a real grasp of how fortunate they are in the U.S. From their clothing, to the class size, the facilities, and the school supplies: these are clearly two different worlds.” Bringing these two worlds together is one of the goals of the curriculum we are developing. How can we bridge the gap and provide students in the US with a new perspective on the world?

Our day concluded with a night drive with Wilson. The drive was freezing cold as we meandered over dirt roads, but it was worth it even though we didn’t see a large variety of species. But what we did see was spectacular: four bat-eared fox kits waiting for mom at their den, a bushbaby sitting in a tall tree, and an aardwolf searching for tonight’s dinner.

Well, we are off to bed and super excited to go to Ol Pejeta Conservancy, though we are sad to leave Mpala.

Cattle in acacia thorn boma

After a good night’s sleep, we woke up to bird songs and beautiful sunshine on the Kenyan savannah. Luck was on our side and we had the pleasure of an impromptu chat with Lauren McGeoch , a University of California at Davis grad student,  who is doing work studying the ecological impacts of cattle on savannah ecosystems.  Here in Kenya, and some other parts of Africa, cattle graze under the watchful eye of herdsmen by day and are corralled in bomas by night. Bomas are fenced-in areas, traditionally constructed from cut, thorny acacia trees or alternatively made from metal and chicken fencing.  These bomas house and protect cattle from predators and thieves during the night.  Individual bomas are kept in one area anywhere from less than a week to more than 4 months (sometimes until the cattle dung becomes so deep that the cows actually have trouble walking) and then the cows have been moved to another boma. Now, that might not sound might not sound fascinating, but after the cows have left the boma is precisely when the really interesting and cool part of the story occurs.  The cow manure remains in the boma and literally transforms the ecosystem. The bomas create nutrient hotspots, called glades, with high levels of phosphorous and nitrogen. These high levels of nutrients are a beacon for wildlife that graze and bed down for the night in what becomes lush, grassy areas.  So… Lauren is researching the biogeochemistry of these bomas and glades and investigating the effects of different boma practices on the landscape and we got to pick her brain.

Grassy glade surrounded by Acacia tre

After speaking with Lauren, we went out with Wilson, a researcher who grew up here at Mpala, and we learned about ongoing studies focused on how to make ranching and wildlife conservation as compatible as possible. Through rain that was torrential at times and misty at others, we stopped almost every 30 seconds to view a new wildlife discovery, from hornbills to spoonbills to water buffalo to even a quick glimpse of a leopard. The funny thing is we haven’t seen any elephants yet, although their large poop is everywhere, including on the path from our banda to the bathroom. Apparently the elephants have headed to the rivers now that the rains have finally come. The unprecedented drought that has afflicted Kenya this year has come to an end here with rains that started a couple of weeks ago. Although it is worth noting that some areas of Kenya have gone more than two years without rain and they still have yet to see it.

Along our drive with Wilson we stopped to speak with Mike, the manager of Mpala Ranch, about the challenges of managing a ranch that supports both livestock and wildlife.  Both of our conversations with Mike and Lauren were very helpful with the development of new curriculum ideas and provided great food for our brainstorming sessions.

To say the least our day was filled to the brim with great conversations and wildlife sightings.

Our team: Jim, Nancy, Courtney, Scott, & Michelle (left to right)

What a journey! To get to Kenya, we drove to Rochester, where the five of us met in the airport parking lot to pack up 350 pounds of books into our luggage (to donate to Kenyan schools).  We flew to Newark, and then London, where we missed our connection to Nairobi. Instead of taking off within a couple of hours, we sat around the airport for 10 hours, encumbered by our luggage (including those 350 pounds of books which had mistakenly been tagged for London rather than checked through to Nairobi).

With 350 lbs. of books, we literally brought everything, but the kitchen sink!

At this point we had to split up, with Jim, Michelle, and Scott flying to Nairobi on Kenyan Airlines while Courtney and Nancy added a new country to their life list with a brief stopover in Quatar in the Middle East. After about 36 hours of travel without a bed or shower, we arrived in Nairobi, met up with the rest of the gang, and loaded into a Land Rover for a 6-hour drive to the Mpala Research Centre.

Jim mastered the crazy city traffic and potholes with Scott skillfully navigating and issuing gentle reminders to stay in the left lane. The last hour was pitch black and on rough dirt roads that at one point had us careening sideways and convinced that we were off the road and wandering aimlessly through the East African savannah.

On the final stretch of the dirt roads, we began shining a flashlight out the window & were astonished to see zebra, giraffes, impala, and oodles of other wildlife. At some points the eyeballs shining back at us were so numerous they looked like holiday lights sparkling through the brush.

So after having a late dinner at Mpala and unloading the Land Rover, we are all settled into our comfy bandas (cute circular huts with thatched roofs).  We are all looking forward to tomorrow when we will be able to see Mpala and the wildlife in the daylight.

Good night all!

We are about to embark on a Crossing Boundaries curriculum development trip to Kenya! Our goal is to create technology-rich curricula that will engage students in exploration of biodiversity conservation issues in the Kenyan savanna and tropical forest biomes.

So here’s the scoop on our trip:

What are our goals? Our goals are to build partnerships with Mpala Research Centre, the Green Belt Movement, and Ol Pajeta Conservancy in an effort to collect ideas and resources useful in developing the Crossing Boundaries Kenya curriculum modules. The curriculum will address core science concepts and highlight relevant information and communications technology driven careers.

Why are we here? We are here in Kenya to meet researchers in the field of conservation biology and to explore the scientific, social, political, and economic dimensions of biodiversity conservation in Kenya.

When are we traveling? Right now! We are leaving today October 23 and will return November 1^st. Here’s our itinerary:

10/23: Depart from Rochester, NY
10/24: Arrive Nairobi (evening)
10/25: Travel to Mpala Research Centre (3-4 hour drive)
10/26: Mpala Research Centre
10/27: Mpala Research Centre
10/28: Travel to Sweetwater Tent Camp (1 hour drive)
10/29: Sweetwater Tent Camp
10/30: Sweetwater Tent Camp
10/31: Travel to Nairobi (2.5 hour drive), meet with Greenbelt Movement – Peter Ndunda, GIS Specialist @ 3pm, & fly out of Nairobi @ 10:55pm
11/1:   Arrive in NYS

Who is on the team? Our Kenya travel team includes Jim MaKinster, Nancy Trautmann , Courtney Wilson, Michelle Watkins, and Scott Krebbeks.