2026 Big Sky GeoCon - From Data to Design

Many of the major themes within Environmental Education rely upon remote sensing and orbital data collection. This unit was developed to introduce students in grades 11-12 to the science behind the maps and graphics they see in class. It ranges from a review of the physics of the electromagnetic spectrum to data manipulation, ground-truthing, and ArcGIS workflows.
The unit begins with a physical modeling of active vs. passive sensing and spectral signatures, teaching students to recognize that every land cover—from healthy forest to impervious urban surfaces—possesses a unique "spectral fingerprint." Students use resources from NASA and the USGS to develop an understanding of how global change can be detected remotely.
As the unit progresses, students access primary data via USGS EarthExplorer, perform change-detection analysis of their local area using Landsat time-series data, and calculate the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) to model ecological disturbance. An infrared sensor and an air quality sensor are used to collect data around the school campus. This field data is crowdsourced via ArcGIS Survey123 and visualized alongside satellite imagery in ArcGIS Living Atlas in an attempt to demonstrate "ground-truthing." The unit culminates in an ArcGIS workflow that helps students build a comprehensive ArcGIS StoryMap portfolio detailing their learning progress throughout the unit.