The Data Stream: Plotting Pollinators at the Bell Museum

The "Plot A Pollinator" activity at the Bell Museum Solution Studio this summer not only features some awesome bumble bee distribution data from the Bee Lawns Team, but is also designed to introduce lower elementary students to Geographic Information Science (GIS). The spatial nature of MSP LTER's data tends to categorize our teaching resources at the middle school or high school level. This highlights a broader issue that myself and other GIS professionals who serve on the Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council's K-12 Education Committee are trying to address. GIS education often focuses on getting mapping software into secondary education, but development of foundational geospatial reasoning can start well before a student reaches the computer lab. The 'Plot A Pollinator' activity introduces key map-reading skills: identifying locations on a coordinate plane, reading a legend, and examining spatial patterns. It also introduces a common data visualization utilized by the MSP LTER: a heat map. A color scale represents how densely urbanized the Twin Cities Metro Area is based on the amount of building rooftop area and road length per a 1-kilometer hexagon within a grid of hexagons across the mapped area. We refer to this mapped variable as "built density" and it may be an important variable in urban bumble bee habitat selection.

Even the hexagons represent an important spatial concept as they are preferred for heat maps for the same reason they show up in bee or wasp nests. Hexagons are the most efficient way to tile a surface with a regular shape without losing any area to gaps. Only three shapes can fit together perfectly to tile a flat surface: equilateral triangles, squares, and hexagons. Of those, a hexagon has the shortest perimeter to its area, making it an efficient choice for visualizing a continuous surface.

Some observers of the mapping activity may also notice that the coordinate grid is not perfectly square. Although lines of latitude and longitude were simplified to be labeled as numbers by letters (Battleship style), their dimensions were kept to demonstrate the distortion that occurs when mapping a two-dimensional grid system to the curved surface of the earth. Because the Twin Cities is positioned halfway between the North Pole and the equator, our study area presents the perfect opportunity to show how lines of longitude get closer and longer as they stretch out toward the poles making a stretched rectangle. In fact, the 45th Parallel, the invisible line of latitude that marks the exact halfway point, is just a short walk away from the Bell Museum, near Roselawn and Cleveland Ave!