Open
Data Sets
Online and digital resources and tools for active learning and hands-on exploration.
How to Use these Resources
Here you’ll find outside resources – data sets, activities, and organizations – that offer useful tools for building out your course curriculum, syllabus, extracurricular, or in-class activities.
These are open data sets, meaning they’re meant to help diverse publics learn, interact with, and produce scientific knowledge.
These resources are divided into topical sections. Use, reuse, and remix these as you see fit – and remember to give credit to the source where it’s due 🙂
Data: Life Sciences
iNaturalist is a crowd-sourced species observation and identification database. Users sign up for accounts and add observations that can have their identifications confirmed by the community. High grade observations (where people agree on identification) get fed into the GBIF database. iNaturalist can produce maps and species lists for use in class.
Classroom tips:
Use iNaturalist to conduct mini-BioBlitzes. Assign your students a specific number of observations to make (on campus or another specific location) or a type of organism to observe (a pollinator BioBlitz, for example).
Create a project for your class where all of your students are contributors. The project function in iNaturalist allows for observation tallies and journaling.
Use downloaded data for your area to investigate biodiversity. You can restrict your dataset to specific times, places, quality grades, etc. You can also get map data as a kml file for use in Google Earth.
Video pairings:
eBird is a citizen science species observation database. Users sign up for accounts and add bird observations. eBird can produce maps, species lists, and data visualizations. An associated app, Merlin Bird ID, can help with species identification.
Classroom tips:
Assign students a location to spend 30 min watching birds and logging their observations.
Have students download location specific data to calculate biodiversity indices or create their own visualizations.
Video Pairings:
FrogWatch is a citizen science phenology and diversity project where people can enter frog observations. Participants join a local group and are assigned times and places to listen for frog calls. FrogWatch-FieldScope is the part of the project where maps, calendars, species lists, and data visualizations can be downloaded.
Classroom Tips:
If the timing and location of your course matches with frog phenology for your area, you can find and join an observation group. More information can be found here.Â
Have students download location-specific data to calculate biodiversity indices or create their own visualizations.
Track species phenology over time and discuss the impacts of climate or ecological change.
Video Pairings:
http://budburst.org/results_data
Project BudBurst is a citizen science project where people can enter observations of various aspects of plant phenology (bud break, flowering, fruiting, etc.). Students can download maps and yearly species lists. A live map can be found here.
Classroom Tips:
Students can join Project BudBurst and log local data (depending on the timing of the course).
Check out Project BudBurst’s own educational suggestions (access them here).
Video pairings:
USA-NPN is a network of individuals and groups that collect phenology data. These groups include citizen science projects, government agencies, schools, etc. The available data can be searched, downloaded, and visualized.
Classroom Tips:
Have students search the available data for their area or a species of interest and present those data as figures to the class.
Use the calendars to make predictions about what species are currently active in your area. Test these predictions in the field.
Video pairings:
https://www.pwrc.usgs.gov/bbs/
The Breeding Bird Survey is a collection of almost 50 years of systematically collected bird distribution and abundance data. Surveyors travel along transects during the peak breeding season to catalog bird diversity. Via the USGS, you can download regional and state based data sets from 1966 to the present.
Classroom Tips:
Have students download location-specific data to calculate biodiversity indices or create their own visualizations.
Video pairings:
http://www.gbif.org
GBIF is an open-access biodiversity data repository featuring over half a million records from all over the world. Some of the databases mentioned above (iNaturalist, eBird) push their data to GBIF.
Classroom Tips:
Have students download location-specific data to calculate biodiversity indices or create their own visualizations.
GBIF will also let you explore data trends here.Â
Video Pairings:
http://www.who.int/entity/gho/database/en
WHO GHO data repository contains links to several health data sets and country statistics including mortality, public health, infectious disease, and many more.
Classroom Tips:
The data sets listed here are varied and overlap with many of the topics covered in Science Forward. They are helpful for introducing statistical analysis while covering these topics. There are many data sets here, so give yourself time to explore.
Video Pairings:
http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navid=DATA_STATISTICS
The USDA Data and Statistics library contains data sets related to a variety of topics covering the sciences involved in the study of agriculture. These include export and trade, food consumption, land use, fertilizer use, crop data, etc. Should you have difficulty accessing these data sets, many federal resources from data.gov have been archived by Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab.
Classroom Tips:
The data sets listed here are varied and overlap with many of the topics covered in Science Forward. They are helpful for introducing statistical analysis while covering these topics. There are many data sets here, so give yourself time to explore.
Antibiotic resistance data are useful for creating time series and discussion evolution of resistance, for example.
Video Pairings:
Data: Physical Sciences
The USDA Data and Statistics library contains data sets related to a variety of topics covering the sciences involved in the study of agriculture. These include export and trade, food consumption, land use, fertilizer use, crop data, etc. Should you have difficulty accessing these data sets, many federal resources from data.gov have been archived by Harvard Law School’s Library Innovation Lab.
Classroom Tips:
The data sets listed here are varied and overlap with many of the topics covered in Science Forward. They are helpful for introducing statistical analysis while covering these topics. There are many data sets here, so give yourself time to explore.
Antibiotic resistance data are useful for creating time series and discussion evolution of resistance, for example.
Video Pairings:
Models & Simulations
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute created HHMI BioInteractive as a resource for high school and college science instructors. Resources on their site are searchable by topic, grade level, and type. We recommend checking out Data Explorer, which is a web tool that features many of the Data Sense skills of Science Forward. There are also modules that use simulations and models.
Classroom Tips:
The interactive media resources are great for classroom use and run out of a web browser, so you should have few compatibility issues.
Video Pairings:
There are many combinations. Examples coming soon.
PhET Interactive Simulations is an OER hosted by University of Colorado Boulder that contains almost 200 browser-based simulations and thousands of instructor-submitted lesson plans. Simulations are available for physics, math and stats, chemistry, earth and space, and biology.
Classroom Tips:
Coming soon.
Video Pairings:
There are many combinations. Examples coming soon.
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