Explore the biosphere and why it is important.

Students can interact with NASA data to build a custom visualizations of local, regional, or global plant growth patterns over time, using the Earth System Data Explorer to generate plots of satellite data as they develop models of this phenomenon.

Use the Data Literacy Cube to guide students’ exploration of mapped data of the Earth System to enrich their observations and inferences.  This is a flexible resource that may be used with a variety of mapped images.  This activity requires a map of Earth data for students to evalu

This mini lesson engages students by watching a NASA video related to plant growth activity around the world using data from the NASA/NOAA Suomi NPP satellite and answering questions on these stability and change relationships.

Students will analyze the monthly seasonal chlorophyll concentration images in our global oceans for the four different months of 2024, and then answer the following questions.

Background information on deforestation.

Students observe seasonal images of Monthly Leaf Area, looking for any changes that are occurring throughout the year.

Students will describe how the spread of COVID-19 is affected by population density and explain why patterns in the spread of COVID-19 are happening over time. 

This mini-lesson guides students' observations of soil moisture anomalies (how much the moisture content was above or below the norm) for the continental US in May 2018.

Students review the NASA video showing biosphere data over the North Atlantic Ocean as a time series animation displaying a decade of phytoplankton blooms and answer questions.