-: Welcome everyone.
We're so pleased that you're here joining us
to be a part of our National Marine Sanctuaries
webinar series.
This series is hosted
by the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
And it's a great way that we find
that we can connect with educators
and other interested people from around the world
to provide you with some scientific expertise
or educational materials,
as well as resources and training that help support ocean
and climate literacy with your audiences.
So just a little bit of housekeeping to let you know,
during the presentation, all attendees have joined us
and you'll be muted and listen only mode.
If you have any questions
or if you're having any technical difficulties,
feel free to enter that into the question box
in the GoToWebinar control panel.
If it is a technical issue, we'll help you on the side.
And of course, if it's any questions,
we'll make sure to include those in our Q & A portion.
We are recording today's session,
and there will be an archive available online
a few weeks after today's live event.
And we'll share more about that.
I did wanna let everyone know that we have
just under 200 registrants for today's exciting webinar,
and let's go ahead and get started.
First, I'd like to introduce myself and my co-host.
I'm Claire Fackler.
I'm a national education liaison
for the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.
And I'm joined by our headquarter's education intern,
Chloe McKenna, who's a student at Eckerd College.
So a couple of introductory slides
before we kick off our presentation.
It's really exciting that the year of 2022
is celebrating 50 years of ocean and coastal conservation.
So 50 years ago in 1972,
Congress passed really powerful legislation
to help us protect the ocean and coast,
legislation such as the Clean Water Act,
the Marine Mammal Protection Act,
and the Coastal Zone Management Act.
And the fourth one is our National Marine Sanctuaries Act.
So again, back in 1972,
some of our strongest conservation language
for ocean protection came to be.
And so, we're celebrating 50 years of this,
and we have a network of 15 national marine sanctuaries
that are part of this marine protected area system,
and two Marine national monuments.
So each of the dots on this map represent those sanctuaries,
and the triangles represent the monuments.
And then we do have these yellow boxes on the map
because as part of America the Beautiful and 30 by 30,
which is the Biden Administration's goal
of protecting 30% of public lands and waters by 2030,
we are seeing our sanctuary system expand.
So Lake Ontario in the Great Lakes and the Chumash Heritage
proposed national marine sanctuaries
are undergoing designation processes right now.
And we'd love to hear your voice,
'cause these are stakeholder-driven conversations,
and we protect, right now as it stands,
over 620,000 square miles of ocean
and Great Lakes treasures as part of the sanctuary system.
And as part of our 50th anniversary,
our tagline is save spectacular.
So anything you can do to help us save, protect,
discover, explore, enjoy,
spectacular is most appreciated.
So a little bit more about sanctuaries.
Each of these special ocean areas
are set aside for a wide variety of reasons.
In some cases, it's because of the incredible biodiversity
that the site is protecting.
In some cases, it's the cultural assets
or the maritime heritage
that these special ocean areas are protecting.
But all said, they provide shelter
and protection for some of our threatened
and endangered marine life,
like this Hawaiian green sea turtle.
And our National Marine Sanctuary Act,
which again, we're celebrating our 50th year come October,
we're mandated to conduct education and outreach,
as well as research and monitoring.
And we do all of this to help protect the resources.
So the plants and animals.
And we wanna protect them now and for future generations.
And so, not only are we trying to protect
these special ocean areas,
we want people like you to enjoy them and recreate in them.
You can do things like kayak
in your national marine sanctuary.
And surprisingly, for many people,
you can fish in many of our sanctuaries,
snorkel,
scuba dive,
surf.
You can get on a boat and view wildlife.
And ultimately, we're hoping that through these interactions
with these special ocean areas,
our national marine sanctuaries or underwater parks
and our monuments, that you might even be inspired
to become a volunteer for us
to help us preserve these places for now and for the future.
All right, enough about all that.
Let's go ahead and dive into today's presentation.
I'm so pleased to have Justin Umholtz here with us today.
Justin is the education coordinator
at the Mokupāpapa Discovery Center in Hilo.
And he's working through
the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation.
He is representing
the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.
And Justin has been an informal educator
and a naturalist interpreter for all of his life.
He's originally from beautiful Santa Rosa, California,
and he now resides near his family
on a small farm in Hilo, Hawai'i.
So with that, Justin, we'll go ahead
and hand you the controls
and let you take away your presentation for today.
-: Hi.
Thank you, Claire.
Aloha mai kākou,
Hello everyone.
Just give me a second.
Oh, it looks like it's up.
Can you see that okay, Claire?
-: Yeah, it looks great. -: Perfect.
So I'm honored to be here with you today
and have the opportunity to share a little bit about
our new coral check-up lesson series.
It's a free curriculum that immerses students
in coral reef conservation across the Hawaiian archipelago.
So the material that I'm introducing you today
is already live and available on our website.
So I really encourage you to head over there after this
to check it out and download it.
Papahānaumokuakea.gov, and we'll be sharing
a lot of links during this.
As an educator, I love to share.
Did the second slide go okay for me?
Looks like it, okay. -: Yes it did.
-: All right, thanks.
I always have a little bit of
connectivity issues on Hawaiʻi island.
Okay, as Claire mentioned,
I work at Mokupāpapa Discovery Center
with some great colleagues.
We are currently closed due to the pandemic,
but I'm really hoping we'll be able to welcome folks soon.
So please come by and visit us in the near future.
During non-pandemic years,
we've been welcoming about 60 to 70,000 visitors a year,
both a lot of local residents,
and then people from all over the world.
So it's a really fun job.
And probably my favorite part
is I get to interact with my colleagues
and between 7,000 and 8,000 students a year,
and engage them in our educational programming.
So I really miss that and I look forward to it.
So I'm very grateful to have you all here
with me today as co-educators.
If you were physically to come visit
Mokupāpapa Discovery Center for an education program,
I've been taught here to,
that it's important to set the space
for the giving and receiving of knowledge
by conducting protocol through oli,
which is the Hawaiian word for chant.
And as I like the way my colleague describes it,
chant incorporates traditional Hawaiian ecological knowledge
through poetic verse.
So this chant is titled, Puka Mai Ka La.
(clapping hands)
(chanting in Hawaiian)
And what is amazing about oli
and other forms of oral history here
is that there's an incredible amount of information
embedded within these lines.
And so, just this short oli that I shared with you today
actually takes you and describes
the journey one would take from Hawai'i island,
where I'm located,
all the way out to the last coral atoll of Hōlanikū,
which is part of the Hawaiian archipelago as well.
And you'll be learning more about that later,
if you're not familiar with it.
I did wanna take a minute to also just acknowledge,
this month is African American History Month,
and here in Hawai'i, it's also Hawaiian Language Month.
So I definitely wanna honor the generations of educators
and advocates who have worked tirelessly
to ensure that keiki,
the children here and everyone
has the foundational knowledge of the language of the land
after it was historically suppressed.
So, E ola mau ka ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi!,
let the Hawaiian language live forever.
I'm definitely learning.
So as Claire, again, already kind of showed you,
here's our sanctuary map,
but I did wanna focus in on Papahānaumokuākea.
We are way out in the middle of the Pacific.
You can see that we have a sister sanctuary,
Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whales National Marine Sanctuary.
That actually protects a series of very important
calving grounds for humpback whales when they migrate here,
which is right now and been seeing
some really amazing activity out on the water.
But if you look farther up to the northwest,
you're gonna see Papahānaumokuākea.
And so, Papahānaumokuākea actually protects the farther,
older Northwestern Hawaiian islands.
You may have also noticed that yellow square
that Claire was referencing
as proposed sites for sanctuary status.
So we are already a Marine National Monument,
which occurs through presidential proclamation.
And then we are currently in the very beginning stages
of National Marine Sanctuary designation as well.
So I'd encourage you to go to our website,
and we actually have an information page
that will tell you more about the designation process
and how you can share your views on that.
So the Northwestern Hawaiian islands
are often called the Kūpuna Islands here,
which in Hawaiian means the elder islands,
and they hold a very important place in Hawaiian cosmogony.
They also are geologically
the oldest islands of the Hawaiian archipelago.
And so, if you look way to the northwest
where it says, Hōlanikū, or in English,
Kure Atoll, the younger English name,
that currently small, low-elevation coral atoll
was actually formed over the same Hawaiian hotspot
that is currently erupting and building Hawai'i island,
just 28 million years ago.
And so, the breadth of this archipelago
is one of the key focal points of this curriculum
is really making sure that students and all of us
are connecting to this entire rich archipelago.
Papahānaumokuākea protects vast coral reefs,
important archeological sites, sacred native Hawaiian sites,
and is home to thousands and thousands
of both terrestrial and marine species.
The deeper in the water you go,
as our Dr. Kosaki always tells me,
the higher the endemic rate based off of their research.
So this is really exciting.
You may also notice that most of our
protected area is open ocean.
And so, somewhere around 98% of Papahānaumokuākea
is protecting open ocean and the unexplored deep ocean.
And as educators,
I wanna make sure you're aware of the website,
the new website just launched in last year,
the Deep Ocean Education Project.
You can see the link there on the slide.
It's an amazing collaboration
and compilation of resources
from the three major organizations, including NOAA,
that are doing deep ocean exploration currently
all across the world.
You can see them up in the upper left.
And this is geared,
this website is specifically geared for teachers.
You can access a lot of cool lesson plans, video clips,
all of which you can organize
and curate in your own account,
and then share with your students
or share with colleagues as you go.
So it's a really important tool that just came out,
and it also lets you follow live footage
of deep ocean exploration.
And I'm gonna take a minute to plug that
because the Exploration Vessel Nautilus
is actually gonna be in Papahānaumokuākea this April.
So if you go to their website, nautiluslive.org,
you can learn more about the expedition,
and you can also follow live,
when they have their ROV down thousands of meters,
you can actually be there seeing it in near-real time.
Your students can type in questions to the control box crew
and they'll get to it as soon as they can.
And you can even set up ship-to-shore live interactions
between your class or group and the crew that's on the ship,
even requesting whether it's ROV engineers,
videographers, science and data-focused folks.
It's really an amazing opportunity.
So I hope you'll take advantage of it,
especially while they're in Papahānaumokuākea.
A very exciting collaboration and improvement
to this whole relationship has been the expansion
or the creation of material and opportunities
in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, in Hawaiian.
And so, if you go to that ship-to-shore link,
which will be going into the chat box,
there's an option to select
those experiences in Hawaiian, in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi.
There's materials that are being created.
And I believe some other opportunities
of Hawaiian narration during some of the live dives.
So a lot of this is very new
and still being formed and created,
really exciting, and my hat's off to everybody involved.
So let's get down to the curriculum now.
We'll get back to the shallow coral reefs.
The link, if we could throw that into the chat, Chloe,
this link, as I said, is live,
and I'm gonna show you the kind of components,
but this is really geared toward
immersing students in existing,
really cool NOAA resources and partner resources
that bring the coral reef to life
because these are areas that are really hard to visit,
especially within the monument, because it's so remote.
It's geared toward middle schoolers.
But I think would easily,
with a little bit of extra support,
work for upper elementary,
and could be bumped up to early high school
with just a little bit higher expectations
of what the students are sharing back.
My plan for this presentation is to give you
a brief overview of the curriculum
since you can download it
and look at it in more detail later.
We'll take a little poll, if folks would like.
I'll cover some brief coral bleaching basics,
and then I'm gonna just walk you through
a couple of the key resources
that we have students access and engage with
that really are amazing.
And I'm excited to show you.
So let's take the first poll.
Who's joining us today?
I wanna make sure I'm speaking to our audience
and get a good sense of where you're coming from.
Claire: Excellent.
We have launched that poll.
If you happen to be in full-screen mode,
you might be wondering, where's the poll?
So go ahead and escape out of that,
so you can respond to the poll.
And it's asking, yeah, who's joining us today?
Are you a classroom teacher, an informal educator?
Are you in a support role for educators,
or you're not an educator,
but you just were interested
in learning more about the topic?
So looks like voting is almost at 80% completed here.
So we'll give you about three more seconds
to log in your poll here.
All righty.
So Justin, are you able to see the results?
If not, I can talk you through them.
-: I can.
Yeah, that's a cool mix.
That's great.
It looks like some of everyone, every category.
So that is great.
And so, I guess what I would say before I move on
is just that this really works for all of you.
This would be fun to do if you just are interested.
I think it would work great as like a,
if you're working with a group kind of informally
who are really wanting to focus on this,
or if you're a classroom teacher,
if, I hope not, we ever have to just go fully virtual again,
this would work 100% virtually
as long as you could video in
to support your students every now and again.
But I think the best would be
if you get to work with your students
for a while in class to get them started,
and then in small groups or individually,
they can then go on and do
a lot of this online on their own.
And then just kind of checking back in.
So great, I'll try to speak to kind of every situation.
If you have any questions as I'm going along,
please type them in the question box.
And I'm gonna try to leave some time
at the end to go over that.
So we're gonna be talking about coral today in Hawai'i.
And I just wanna start by honoring
and acknowledging the fact that Native Hawaiians
have long viewed
and sustainably managed coral reefs as vital ecosystems.
So this image that you're seeing is actually one part
of a much longer mural that we house
at Mokupāpapa Discovery Center.
It was created by the artist Kahi Ching,
and this is his interpretation
of the Hawaiian creation chant called Ke Kumulipo.
This is actually over 2,000 lines of oral history.
That line that I have printed there
is one of the early ones, Hānau ka ʻukukoʻakoʻa,
Born is the coral polyp.
And so, as I've been taught, from lipo,
from primordial deep blue darkness,
the Kumulipo describes how life evolved
from this first simple coral polyp
to the complexity and diversity of life
that we see around us.
And that includes us.
And so, what's amazing to me
is that this was an evolutionary theory
that established inner species relationships
and responsibilities for stewardship.
And so, I'm not an expert at this, obviously.
So I would refer you to people
like Dr. Pualani Kanaka'ole Kanahele
if you wanna learn more about this,
'cause it really is a rich foundational
perspective here and resource.
So as the Kumulipo shares, coral reefs are the foundation
of nearshore ecosystems in Hawai'i.
About 70% of the coral reefs in the United States
can actually be found in the Hawaiian archipelago.
And the majority of them
are in the Northwestern Hawaiian islands.
So as many of you are aware, I'm sure,
coral reefs across the world are struggling to survive
as they're facing growing stressors.
And the stressor we really focus on in this curriculum
is ocean warming as a result of climate change.
So that heat stress to corals.
As I said, it's really important to us
to make sure that our students
or whoever's engaging with this curriculum
really understand the full breadth
and richness of the Hawaiian archipelago.
I don't know about you, but even here in Hawai'i
and when I was growing up,
we were mostly just taught about the main Hawaiian islands,
the younger high islands where humans reside currently.
But the archipelago, as you can see, is much, much longer.
There's another 1,200 nautical miles
of small islands and emerging coral atolls.
And what we ask students to do is with the,
where those red dots are on there,
they actually choose a study site from each,
from the Northwestern Hawaiian islands
and the main Hawaiian islands,
so that as they report back with their class,
we'll get a much kind of richer experience
and understanding of the archipelago.
All right, it looks like there's a little lag
in my slide changing, but okay, good.
You can see the student workbook.
So when you go to our website to download these,
you're gonna see two PDFs.
The first is our student field journal.
Because I was assuming a lot of
kind of independent student work,
it's written in a very kind of engaging,
direct way to the students,
asking them to step in as coral scientists in training.
The language is very kind of impersonal in a way.
I mean, sorry, personal in a way
rather than kind of third person,
as you would see in some lesson plans and things.
There are also really clear instructions
walking them through this process,
'cause I know we are introducing a lot of complex topics.
The part that I was really excited about
and I hope works for you, I'd love to hear feedback,
is that we were able to make these fillable forms.
So the idea being you can download
the student field journal,
make copies for each of your students.
They would just rename it to have their name on it.
And so, as they're going through the lessons
and they can respond to the questions,
they can put in their observations,
there's room for all of that within this field journal.
So that then they can just turn it back into you.
So hopefully that works well.
Please let me know if you have any suggestions
as you work with it.
Of course, I don't expect everybody to be coral experts.
I'm not a coral expert.
I actually tapped into some great folks
who help me here at NOAA, I'll mention later,
but we did put together an extensive teacher's guide for you
that gives a lot of good background information.
And most importantly,
because I've worked with some of these,
they can get kinda clunky to move through.
So I spent some time really organizing quick hyperlinks
to help you navigate through.
So it opens with a nice clean summary of the lessons
and the two units that I'll be introducing to you,
but you can quickly jump to individual
detailed lesson descriptions
to the Next Generation Science Standards alignments
and the other Core Standards alignments
that we connected to each of these,
and the answer keys, which is always helpful,
so that hopefully you can kind of
move around this pretty quickly.
There's also a dive deeper piece
at the end of most of the lessons.
And this is where, when the narrative
of this curriculum didn't quite leave enough room
for you to, say, go deeper into coral biology,
we were sure to add in some links
to other great NOAA resources that'll help you,
if you wanna spend a little more time there,
help you engage your students with that topic
or other topics.
There's also, where I was aware of them,
opportunities to engage your students
in hands-on activities,
citizen science programs related to it,
or kind of community engagement opportunities.
All right.
Sorry about the slow lag here,
but I think you can see it now.
Okay, so I'm gonna give you a quick overview.
As I said, there are two units.
Unit one is really putting students
in the role of the scientific diver.
So it's in the water monitoring coral.
How does that work?
What is this job like?
And they're gonna be accessing a lot of online tools
that are very immersive to start gathering data
on their two research sites,
building their skills and understanding of this role.
In a second, you're gonna be able to see the breakdown.
There it is.
These are the four lessons that are within unit one.
The first two lessons are pretty light.
It's really just an introduction
to what coral reef ecosystems are here in Hawai'i,
kind of the importance to other life.
And a very brief introduction to what coral bleaching is.
That gentleman there is actually a talented educator.
He is our aquarist at Mokupāpapa Dscovery Center
and a marine science graduate
from the University of Hawai'i Hilo.
So he was kind enough to create that video with me
during this pandemic time and is a really fun piece.
So even if you're not gonna tackle this whole curriculum,
I would really encourage you just to follow the link
that will be put in the chat
and go just take a look at that, too.
And that work, that's a lot more accessible,
I would say, for younger elementary as well.
Lesson two is going to be, again, that introduction,
but expanding our students' view of Hawai'i
to include the entire archipelago.
It's introducing Papahānaumokuākea,
and really tapping into some of the amazing resources
that one of the trustees of the monument,
the Office of Hawaiian Affairs,
has created to help people better understand
the importance and cultural significance of this place.
Lesson three is where we really dive into
the meat of your student research.
And so, here they're gonna be accessing
those cool online resources that I was mentioning,
which I'll show you in a bit,
and they're gonna start gathering information
and watching videos, and even 360 videos
of what their sites are like,
writing down their observations,
starting to build an assessment
and an understanding from multiple perspectives.
The last lesson is really where all of that culminates.
Thanks to, the first person I want to acknowledge
is Dr. John Burns.
He is a professor at, a associate professor, I think,
at University of Hawai'i at Hilo.
He's worked for NOAA, too.
He's doing really incredible work using, what is it?
Using photogrammetry to capture
really incredible images of reefs.
And he gave us a lot of his high-resolution images
from the actual sites for us to have students
start to do their coral bleaching assessment.
The image you can see there
is one kind of overlaying quadrat
where students are actually asked to do their calculation
of what percentage of the quadrat is bleached for that reef.
And then kind of figuring out
kind of what their overall aggregated assessment
for the reef is related to coral beaching.
It's not real complicated math, but it's a lot to take in.
So we walk them very slowly through it.
Lesson two or unit two is really fun
because we're popping the students out of the water
and actually engaging them with NOAA satellite data.
And here are some of the amazing online tools
that anybody can access.
They're all free and online ready.
But I found when I was first looking
that they're a little intimidating
until you get to know how to interact with them,
and then they're just really fun.
And so, we're really walking students through
how to engage with these
so that they can get a little bit bigger picture view
of the impacts of coral bleaching
on their particular study sites.
And so, here are the four lessons related to that unit.
Lesson one accesses an existing great NOAA tool
called NOAA data in the classroom.
And if you're not aware of it,
we're gonna put the link in the chat box for you.
But this is great because it's already
kind of walking students through
in a very interactive way on how to understand
some of the basic concepts
around heat stress and sea surface temperature,
and how scientists monitor that related to coral reefs.
I would also encourage you,
there are other learning modules,
including ocean acidification,
learning about El Nino and how it works,
water quality and sea level.
And I know that there's some talk about adding some more
or updating some of those.
So please check out that link
because it's a really great existing resource.
Lesson two is where we really dive students in.
And so, this is where we're using
NOAA's online coral reef watch tool.
It's really fun once we kinda get past
all the colors and trying to figure out what's going on,
and this is where I really wanna thank
Dr. Paulo Maurin, who is with
NOAA's Coral Reef Conservation Program through Lynker.
And he worked extensively with me on this,
even putting together video tutorials
and just advising me to make this
as accessible as possible to students.
So we created a lot of different ways
for students to learn about what we're asking them to,
the information we're asking them to gather there.
What's really neat about coral reef watch,
and that comes into lesson three,
is that while coral reef watch allows them,
the first, lesson two really introduces them
how to look at real-time data or near-real-time data.
Lesson three teaches them how to look back
at the historic record.
And so, this way they're able to look at long-term impacts
of coral reef, or sorry, heat stress on coral,
on their coral reef study sites.
And I think that really helps them
kind of think a little bit more are critically about,
oh, how is this kind of longer-term climate change
impacting the reefs I'm studying?
We close out kind of the whole curriculum with lesson four.
And this is where, we don't wanna leave students
only seeing how kind of dire the situation is
for coral reefs, but more what can they do
and what are people doing already?
And so, we're tapping into another great resource,
if you're not aware of it,
it's NOAA's Ocean Today collections.
The coral reef collection on every full moon
is really great.
I reference that in the curriculum multiple places,
but we tap into the, what can we do video of that.
And they bring up a lot of different kind of challenges
that coral reefs are gonna have to get,
we're gonna have to support coral reefs through,
and then what people are doing to confront those challenges.
And so, we ask students to research,
to choose these topics, research them,
and look at it kind of at that larger scale
global level and national level,
what are these big organizations doing?
But also like, what's going on in my community?
Let me interview somebody,
especially if you're here in Hawai'i
or somewhere where there are coral reefs,
let me interview somebody on the ground
who's doing this work who can tell me about what's going on,
what's working, and how I can get involved.
And what I'm hoping is through that engagement,
and then through all the sharing that will happen
at the end of this lesson with the class,
it might inspire your class
to kinda take that next step of engagement,
especially if there's a local opportunity.
And there are some larger, big opportunities
that I link in the extensions section.
All right, so it's 12:30 my time.
Let's take a poll.
How comfortable are you teaching about coral bleaching?
If everybody is already like, oh, I got this nailed,
then I'm gonna skip this next part.
But if we have enough people
who would like a little quick 101,
I'm gonna go ahead and just walk us through
the basics of coral bleaching.
Claire: Excellent, the poll's been launched.
So go ahead.
And Justin, just so you know, a teacher let me know
that the Dole Middle School students
are in the classroom with the teacher.
So there are some students listening along.
So with that, I certainly think
giving a little more information about coral bleaching
will be helpful, but let's also see what our poll says.
-: Oh, excellent.
Thanks a letting me know.
Welcome everybody.
I'm glad you're here.
Claire: All right, I think we've slowed down here.
So go ahead and share the results.
Yeah, looks like, kind of a broad mix.
-: Yeah.
I'm gonna go ahead, it looks like the majority,
we'll do it.
I won't spend a lot of time on it
because there are great NOAA resources
I reference in the curriculum,
but I will take a little bit of time,
just so we're all on the same page
when I share the resources.
For those of you who are already
really comfortable teaching coral bleaching,
I would love your feedback on this
when you get a chance to look at the curriculum,
and just making sure that we're taking advantage
of all the really cool opportunities.
And I am very happy if you wanna adapt
and change this to fit what you want.
And I would just ask that I would love to see
whatever kind of adaptations and creations you come up with.
So we can kind of continue to improve this
and build a conversation.
All right.
So why does coral bleach?
What is coral bleaching?
There are many factors
that can stress and damage coral reefs.
So overfishing, run-off of pollutants
and sediment from onshore, physical damage
from boat anchors, or people stepping on coral,
even some chemicals, for example,
that are in some sunscreens have been shown to damage coral,
but the current understanding through research
is that heat stress, long-term heat stress
due to climate change is really
the biggest negative impact on coral reefs globally.
So one thing I am really excited about
is there's some really cool,
more kind of coral biology curriculum
that is available through some of our sister sanctuaries.
I know Flower Garden Banks
National Marine Sanctuary has some great stuff,
Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary has some great stuff.
And I think they're coming out
with some new pieces on coral restoration soon.
So I know Claire worked with folks
on creating a collection
of Office of National Reef Sanctuary resources
related to coral reef ecosystems.
So we'll put that in the chat,
and I would definitely encourage you to check that out.
What we're looking at here is a clip
from that video I made with Michael
from lesson one, unit one,
and this is a pōhaku puna, or a lobe coral.
And if you look at all of those individual little dots,
those little circles,
they're actually individual coral polyps.
And so, coral is actually an animal.
It's a colony of small animals that are cnidarians.
They're related to sea anemones.
They're related to jellyfish.
They have these stinging cells called nematocysts
in their tentacles that they use to capture prey,
small plankton that is carried along in the currents.
The reason we don't really see this
is because they feed at night.
Most of the time they're hiding
in their calcium carbonate shell, skeleton.
And so, that's why they look like colorful rocks
is because we're only seeing them
kind of in their hiding place.
Sorry, there's a little bit of lag.
It's throwing me off, but once they capture their prey,
they're putting it into their mouth
and into their simple digestive tract.
But the part that really comes to play here
that we need to understand for coral bleaching
is their amazing symbiotic relationship
with a microscopic algae, zooxanthellae,
or some people say zooxanthellae.
And what's amazing with that
is it actually gives coral its color.
The coral polyp, the animal
takes the zooxanthellae into its tissue.
And then in addition to getting it's food
from what it can catch through suspension feeding,
it's actually given a huge portion of the zooxanthellae's
photosynthetic energy for its own use.
In return, the zooxanthellae is getting shelter
and some specific nutrients back.
So it's through this relationship
that we have these very healthy, robust,
thriving coral reefs, and very colorful coral reefs.
NOAA has a great infographic, which I have the link for.
It'll go in the chat here in a second,
that kind of breaks down how coral bleaching works.
We're focusing, of course, on heat stress,
but it lists some of the other stresses.
And in this infographic,
you can see that we have a healthy coral
full of zooxanthellae.
Students learn that as coral gets stressed,
it can no longer actually keep
that zooxanthellae in it's body.
So it'll expel it out of that same mouth part.
And as it starts to expel the zooxanthellae,
it becomes more of a faded color or even splotchy white
because the calcium carbonate shell skeleton
is becoming more visible.
So we introduce students to the idea of partial bleaching,
which is the first signs of stress.
And then as that stress continues,
we're looking at fully bleached.
And the important piece here is that
just because the coral is bleached,
it doesn't mean that it's dead.
Remember, the coral polyp can feed using its tentacles,
but it's limited to what it can catch
that passes by on the currents.
And so, at this point,
it's not getting all that extra energy.
It's more vulnerable to disease and damage.
If that stress continues,
then there is a potential for death, for mortality.
And so, let me show you what that looks like
on a real coral reef here.
So here, this is a reef in Papahānaumokuākea.
This particular coral has a beautiful purplish color.
And the way that Paulo was explaining it to me
is that regions across the world get different temperatures.
Whether you are in American Samoa or Hawai'i,
the maximum summer temperatures
that you would see are gonna be different.
And so, these satellites are measuring
that kind of historical high temperature
that you would get in your summer, wherever you live.
And that is called kind of the summer max.
So when the temperature goes one degree higher
than that kinda average high max,
that's when Paulo tells me,
I like the way he puts it, the clock starts ticking.
That's when the coral polyps start to feel that heat stress.
The longer that heat stress lasts and the hotter,
the higher above that maximum
historic average temperature it is,
the more your corals are gonna start to get stressed
and the faster they'll get stressed.
So let's take a look at what that means.
We've got number one, healthy, beautiful, vibrant coral.
We've got number two,
as soon as my internet catches up.
We've got partially bleached coral.
You can see that it's lighter in color,
and there's kind of a splotchiness to it
where we're seeing the calcium carbonate base.
There's number three, where it's bleached,
it's fully bleached.
You can see the full calcium carbonate skeleton,
not necessarily dead.
This is how I've been taught
you can pretty much tell that coral is dead,
number four, and this is where the macro algaes,
the algaes have actually grown over
the skeleton of the coral.
It's basically just using it like it would rock.
It's just substrate to grow on.
At that point, we know that the coral's dead,
and all of this knowledge is what helps students
start to do their own coral bleaching assessment.
All right, so I'm going to change my screen,
and hopefully this will work.
I'm gonna start showing you some of the tools.
Oops.
I thought I loaded that.
Sorry guys.
Okay.
There we go.
It should come in in one sec.
Yep, looks good. -: Okay.
Okay, so this is what Dr. Burns, John Burns,
his teams have put together.
This is actually an older version.
They currently run the MEGALAB,
which is sort of the next level of this,
but I love the Coral Health Atlas
through University of Hawai'i,
because it's so easy to interact with.
He has created a nice interactive map for us
of the Hawaiian archipelago.
Each of those tags represents one of the study sites,
plus a few more.
And then down below it has the names
of the places that we wanna go.
I'm gonna take you to Waiʻopae
because that's here on Hawai'i island,
and it has a special place in my heart
because it is unfortunately no longer around.
It was covered by the 2018 eruption by the Kīlauea Volcano.
So students are gonna be able to see
some really cool pictures.
They're gonna see where it is on the map.
This is gonna be a little bit of a challenge
'cause of my time lag.
I apologize for that, but as they scroll down,
they're also gonna be learning
a little bit of historic importance
and the cultural importance of this site.
This is only one of the resources
they learn for that aspect.
The main thing that they're doing
is they're tapping into these three buttons here,
360 pano, 3D reef model, and the reef data.
And so, I'm hoping this will work for us.
We're gonna go into the 360 pano.
It may not play really great,
but Dr. Burns has created these 360 videos
of all of these sites the students are studying,
so they can actually see what it's like.
And they're actually,
I'm asking them to write down their observations,
look for the marine life that's there,
look for coral bleaching,
describe the characteristics of this particular reef,
color, structure, whatever they can kind of pull out of this
as they sit with the video.
So that's just one example.
There's some really neat ones.
This was a beautiful reef, really incredible.
It's sad to see it go.
Once they have done that,
they're also gonna be looking at the 3D reef models
that Dr. Burns and his teams have created.
I'm not gonna hit play on this
because it takes a while to load.
But when you do, students can actually
move around on this reef, zoom in, change the angle.
And this is all created digitally
from hundreds of overlapping photos
or video that they're taking,
and then creating and using software.
What's amazing about this, too, is it's very cutting edge.
They're building software that can analyze
this digital image to find, where is there coral bleaching?
Where are their diseases?
What is the structure of the reef?
How good of a habitat is it?
And if they redo this every few years, create the next one,
they can then compare the different models
and see how that's changing over time.
So that's gonna really help us
because there's some huge changes going on
in our coral reefs right now.
And these reefs are vast,
especially within Papahānaumokuākea.
So it's really hard to monitor
more than small sections of it.
The last thing I'm gonna show you
is every student's favorite, the bar graph.
And so, here, students are able to,
we're not asking for a lot of detail here,
but just kind of looking at the top section,
looking at what percentage is bleaching,
what percentage is healthy, and then identifying
if there are any other major concerns
that came up on that top bar graph series.
So here we see that macroalgae overgrowth
is somewhat of an issue there at nearly 5%.
That means that large algaes
are starting to overgrow the coral,
which can block out sunlight
and ultimately kill the coral, so it's a big issue,
like maybe there's too much nutrient
coming in from that particular area.
We also ask students to learn a little bit about
the nuance of these studies,
because here they're looking at aggregated data,
they're looking at
a bunch of different surveys put together.
And so, either using that map that's on the right,
or using this dropdown menu,
they're able to switch around
and look at the results for just one site.
And we don't ask for a lot of analysis
just to kind of look and see
if there were particular transects
or particular study lines of reef
that had bigger issues that stood out to them.
All right, so I'm gonna close this one out
and take you to another really amazing resource.
So this is our Papahānaumokuākea Flickr site.
And I was made aware that, just like YouTube,
there can be inappropriate content hosted on Flickr.
So make sure that you take the same precautions you would
when students are accessing YouTube.
But our site is incredible
because it has a huge amount of still images and video
that different people who are studying
or doing cultural protocol or other things
within Papahānaumokuākea have added
and shared with all of us.
A lot of these are free and available
in the public domain for download and use.
And so, we ask students to use them
for their presentations and their research.
By going to the albums setting,
it's organized it in such a way
that they can actually go to their specific study sites.
So for example, if they're studying Lalo
or the English name here, French Frigate Shoals,
or Kure Atoll, which we remember,
its ancestral name is Hōlanikū, they can click into that,
and they are going to have all kinds.
This is probably a little bit bandwidth heavy for me,
but I'll let you see a couple of the photos here.
They're gonna have all kinds of
just incredible footage to look at,
both of the scientific work going on,
and then of specific species.
And so, we're asking students
to actually gather data this way.
What kind of marine organisms are they seeing?
How would they describe the reefs that they're seeing?
And so, that way it goes beyond
just their one particular area
that we're asking them to do coral bleaching assessments.
I'm gonna zoom you in on this eel image here.
And so, another great thing is that down,
as soon as it loads, there we go,
there down below the image,
there's a description of what they're seeing.
And often there is a link to maybe an article
that was written about this particular research project,
or other things that students can get
a little bit more information about what they're seeing.
They also, oops, I have my control boxes in the way.
There we go.
On the far right is a download button.
We do have some professional photographers
who have shared their stuff up here.
Those you can't download, but you can view,
but if they were done by public employees
or that people didn't wanna put a copyright on it,
there's a lot here that you can actually download
and you can choose a size that makes sense for you.
So students, this is a great resource
for your presentations.
People are gonna be wowed by what you can share.
All right, and I am running out of time,
but I have to show you the last resource here.
This is NOAA's Coral Reef Watch.
So this is really what we're using for unit two.
And you can see that there are actually
NOAA virtual stations measuring heat stress
all over the world, but I'm gonna zoom you in
to the main Hawaiian islands alert gauges
and time series graph.
And so, I'm gonna be looking away
at my bigger screen here for this part.
So what students are learning about is,
how can I see what heat stress
is impacting my corals right now?
'Cause there's a very small time delay on what's going on.
So here, right now in February,
it's winter for us here in Hawai'i.
So we have a nice, clear screen.
We're looking at this box in the upper left
is the current data.
And then there's forecasts going out four weeks,
8 weeks and 12 weeks.
So students can click on any of those for a zoom in.
We're not gonna do that,
'cause there's nothing to really look at here.
These gauges on the right are telling them,
so what kind of impact does this map,
does this heat stress have on our corals?
There's no stress.
And then moving into kinda like
what we do for tornadoes or tsunamis,
there's a watch and a warning.
Once we get to the point where coral,
we're gonna likely see coral bleaching,
we hit this light red alert level one.
And once we get to the point where we have
enough heat built up
that we're gonna likely see coral death or mortality,
then we get into this dark red alert level two.
So I'm gonna show you what this looks like
during a hotter period of the year,
and do that first by showing you
this cool time series graph.
So this is lesson three,
is really carefully walking students
how to read this graph, or aspects of it.
You can see here that we have the same gauges down below.
So we've got from no stress,
over to alert level two along the bottom x-axis.
We've got the months of the year along here,
January, February, March for two years, 2021 and 2022.
So we can see that the last couple years
have actually not been bad for corals.
We haven't had that heavy accumulation
of sea surface temperatures,
but students are gonna go
and they're gonna look farther back in time.
So let's take a look at 2018 to 2019.
And that dropdown menu goes all the way back to 1986.
Aha, so if you look over here at 2019,
you're gonna see that there actually was
a significant thermal stress period.
And so, we can go here and we can see, okay,
we remember that this orangish color
is a bleaching warning.
The red means that we have alert level one,
meaning bleaching is likely,
and then we have this huge period
from late September into October
where we were in alert level two,
meaning mortality was likely.
So that was a lot of heat buildup.
This doesn't tell us where,
and our students are studying their particular site.
So they wanna know, how did this impact my site?
And so, we can take this bigger-picture information,
October, 2019, and go back up to our maps.
And now, I'm gonna change our date.
Let's look at 2019 in October,
and let's pick maybe middle of the month.
Yeah, so now it's changed.
And we're only gonna look at the current
because we're looking at the past,
so we don't need to see any forecasts.
I'm gonna click on this map, the current,
and it blows it up for us.
And then from here,
your students can take a look at their sites.
They've learned already where their sites are located
within the main Hawaiian islands.
There's another map for the Northwestern Hawaiian islands,
and they could be seeing, oh my goodness,
West Hawai'i in particular was suffering
from alert level two during that time of year.
And so, they would be doing this
for all of the different two-year views
going all the way back to 1986
so that they can start to build a picture of like,
how many times have my study sites
been dealing with coral bleaching or even mortality events?
And this is where kind of going back
to being a coral scientist,
you would then go and do some on-the-ground
or in-the-water monitoring
to see what the actual impact was.
The nice thing is students can also breeze through
the different dates or switch around
so they're not just looking at one day.
They can kinda see how the heat stress areas
change on the map over time, because maybe,
for example, Lehua, which is a small island
just north of Niʻihau here off the far upper left,
that right now is only under a coral reef watch,
coral bleaching watch.
But later on, just from memory,
I'm remembering that it actually shifted
to a alert level one during part of that time.
So students would wanna make sure they do that.
All right, so I'm going to close that,
and bring us back to our slides,
and leave you a little bit of time for questions,
but please, I know I took a little bit of time with those.
If you have any questions,
please put 'em in the chat in the question box,
and Claire and Chloe will email them to me
and I'll answer them there and respond back
as we share the archive of this.
I did wanna let you know that I'm considering
doing a more in-depth teachers' workshop
if I get enough interest.
So right now, I'm tentatively holding the March 15th date
from 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM Hawai'i standard time.
At that time, I can't remember if we're
five or six hours difference for Eastern Standard Time.
We don't do daylight savings here, but please email me.
My email is there, if you're interested,
and if we get enough interest,
then we'll set something up
and we can take some more time
walking through the curriculum.
In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact me
and we can talk, just talk more about your experience,
and I'd love to hear how it goes for you.
Thank you so much. -: Excellent.
Thank you so much, Justin.
We're getting some good feedback from the attendees
that this is excellent.
Love the interactive approach.
And we do have some questions coming in.
So let's go ahead, Chloe,
go ahead and pick one of the first questions for us.
-: Sure, I think the first two kind of go with each other.
Someone is asking for more information
on volunteer information
for how to get involved in Hawai'i,
as well as, someone else asked,
is Hawai'i still doing humpback counting
as a volunteer opportunity?
-: They are.
It's a little adapted,
but if you go to our sister sanctuary's website,
the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whales
National Marine Sanctuary,
maybe we can throw that in the chat.
I think they already started
because we're pretty far into the season,
but you can learn more about that on their website.
-: Yeah, excellent.
Little scaled back 'cause of the pandemic,
but still collecting good data, the sanctuary ocean count.
-: And it is whaley this year, let me tell ya.
It has been so- -: That's awesome.
-: A mom and juvenile just off the shore
of one of our local beaches,
and the juvenile was just breaching left and right.
It was really fun.
-: Oh, that's so exciting to see.
We do have a question about,
does bleached coral come back?
Like, is there any survival
once they've hit that coral stress?
-: Thank you for bringing that up.
I did not talk about that.
Once coral is bleached, once the stress event has left
and temperatures are back to normal
or what other stress it was,
then they can bring that zooxanthellae
back into their bodies, and so they can recover.
So part of the concern and the reason for that lesson three
is that it's that kind of more frequent occurrences
of these heat stress events
that makes it harder for coral to recover
and to kind of reestablish with the zooxanthellae.
But it can be done.
-: Another question is, what type of waters
can coral reefs be found in?
-: Oh, it's pretty varied.
If you go to the data, NOAA data in the classroom,
they actually, the first level one activity
is talking about kind of the band of temperatures
around the equator where corals thrive.
So I think that would probably be
the most visually easy for you to see,
'cause there's a temperature range
that corals really need,
at least shallow reef corals.
-: This is an interesting one.
So a couple of years ago,
this teacher saw a science fair project
about deodorants and bleaching.
I know you talked about sunscreens,
and I mean even here in California,
I see coral safe sunscreens now,
but is there like any issue with deodorant?
Is there a safer type of deodorant to use?
Is that something that's come up?
-: I am afraid I don't know.
That would be a good thing to look on the NOAA's
Coral Reef Conservation Program's website, maybe.
I've only seen research for the certain chemicals
in sunscreens that almost, I mean,
they work as a sunscreen and they make it hard
for the zooxanthellae to photosynthesize,
but that's all I'm aware of.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure.
-: All right, I think we need to, let's see,
sorry, go ahead and wrap up.
So I'll go ahead and run these for you, Chloe.
-: Thank you everyone. -: Yes, so thank you.
Yeah, thank you to Justin.
And thank you to everyone
for participating in today's presentation.
A recording of the webinar will be posted eventually
to our archived site of where all our webinars go
on National Marine Sanctuary's Webinar Series,
and everyone that registered for the webinar
will also receive an email
when this link archive is available.
All attendees to the live presentation
will also receive a certificate of attendance
for one hour of professional development.
And something else that we love to plug
is we have been conducting evaluations
of the webinar series since 2016.
We would greatly appreciate if you complete
the short six-question survey
that can be completed in two to three minutes.
And if you are a formal educator,
which I know a lot are on today,
and you're willing to participate
in a longer NOAA survey
about distance learning and multimedia,
I will put the link in the chat for that.
And this concludes today's live presentation.
Thank you for joining us, everyone.
-: Yeah, thanks again, Justin.
Thanks Chloe.
Have a great day, everyone.
Thanks for joining.
Justin: Thank you everyone. Aloha!