This lesson is taken from NASA's Phytopia: Discovery of the Marine Ecosystem written in partnership with Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science with funding from the National Science Foundation.

Dr. Wickland works at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where she oversees the planning and implementation of NASA's Terrestrial Ecology research program and leads its Carbon Cycle and Ecosystems Focus Area. She coordinates research programs in land cover and land use change, ocean biogeochemistry, terrestrial ecology, and biodiversity. 

This StoryMap lesson plan allows students to explore global phytoplankton distribution using chlorophyll concentration data in a 5 E-learning cycle. Students will investigate the processes that allow phytoplankton populations to thrive, as well as how their role in the carbon cycle impacts the other spheres of the Earth System. 

This resource helps to identify and access GLOBE protocols and hands-on learning activities that complement the Phytoplankton Distribution phenomenon.

In this lesson, students investigate and identify various phytoplankton using images that were previously taken with a compound microscope.  Credit:  This lesson is modified from a lesson of the same name created by The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education&nbsp

The purpose of this activity is to have students use an Earth Systems perspective to identify the various causes associated with changes to Earth's forests as they review Landsat imagery of site locations from around the world.

Students use Phytopia: Exploration of the Marine Ecosystem, a computer-based tool, to investigate various phytoplankton species and topics relating to phytoplankton biology. 

In this activity, you will use an inexpensive spectrophotometer* to test how light at different visible wavelengths (blue, green, red) is transmitted, or absorbed, through four different colored water samples.

My NASA Data has recently released several new resources, StoryMaps, for use in educational settings.

This USGS activity leads students to an understanding of what remote sensing means and how researchers use it to study changes to the Earth’s surface, such as deforestation.