Sarah Slack from Intermediate School (IS) 223 in Brooklyn, NY joins us to talk about termite flatulence, joining the New York City Teaching Fellows program, teaching science, changes to Earth’s climate, Sarah’s traveling to Antarctica with PolarTREC, being on an icebreaker at the onset of the Covid pandemic, GIS class on a boat while going through Drake Passage, Sarah’s experience as an Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow, examining urban heat island effects, the Landsat Explorer app, the Climate Education Leadership Team, building pathways for students to enter the earth sciences as a career path, student engagement with collecting temperature and analyzing urban heat data, science as a way of thinking rather than just facts, applications of online remote sensing and GIS apps in the classroom, the Geospatial Semester at JMU, and much more. Show notes and photos are available at: https://americaview.substack.com

Joseph Ortiz from Kent State University returns to talk about remote sensing of Mars, Joseph’s work with his collaborators on a National Geographic funded project at Vaal Dam in South Africa, water quantity issues in a semi-arid environment, a time when the region came within five days of running out of water, a water level drop of one to two stories, microcystis, water quality issues, renewable energy sources, boat problems at night with a lack of fuel and a shoal, measuring different types of algae with a multichannel fluorometer, Joseph working with students from Wits University, open source software for hyperspectral imagery analysis of South Africa, Whitebox tools for lidar analysis, MultiSpec, analyzing harmful algal blooms, the red edge bands from Sentinel, and much more. Show notes and photos are available at: https://americaview.substack.com/.

Caiyun Zhang from Florida Atlantic University joins us to talk about a competitive college test, being randomly placed into the Ocean University of China to study Geology, being introduced to GIS and aerial photography in graduate school, hyperspectral lidar, Caiyun’s love of all things Florida, the birth of FloridaView, Alaskan permafrost assessment and studies, wetland mapping in the Everglades, working with the National Park Service at Canaveral National Seashore for assessing damage from hurricanes, community mapping for flood estimation, and much more. Show notes and photos are available at: https://americaview.substack.com