EarthVision at Sidwell Friends

[Adam Frampton]

Interested members of the scientific community: 

My name is Adam Frampton, and I am a student at the Sidwell Friends High School 
in Washington, DC. During this school year, a team of students wrote a grant  
proposal with a team of students and was awarded an EPA grant under the  
EarthVision project at Saginaw Valley State University, in Bay City Michigan.  
My team, which includes 4 other students and 1 teacher, participated in  
several weeks of classes/lectures in Michigan.   

Our proposal outlined a study of the coral reefs in Southern Florida. We are 
examining the causes of the decline which has taken place since 1980. Using 
computational analysis and scientific visualization, we will be creating 
models, simulations, and visualizations of abiotic and biotic factors.  

Our school has been awarded a Silicon Graphics Indy workstation equiped  
with the latest in graphics technology, and access to the Cray Supercomputer  
at the National Environmental Supercomputing Center, here in Bay City. Our team  
has experience programming in C and FORTRAN, which are part of the program,  
but we will be using AVS to create the actual visualizations. 

We have been working with Dr. James Porter and others to gather our data.  
Biotic factors that we will be looking at include: percent of coral coverage, 
species abundance (two species which Dr. Porter refers to as "indicator  
species,") and species diversity. Abiotic factors include: salinity, pH,  
temperature, and turbidity. The team recently gained access to the EPA Storet  
database so perhaps our study will also include heavy metals and other factors. 
We will be examining the thermocline which causes warmer, hypersaline waters 
to sink, and attempting to determine it's cause. If possible, we will also  
try to create a simulation in which we can adjust the abiotic factors and 
"see" it's effect upon the coral health.  

Our homepage just opened the other day. Although not quite complete, it  
does provide a very good outline of what we're going. You can find that  
homepage at http://coral.sidwell.edu. (Netscape 1.1N+ / 8bit graphics  
are better for viewing) Because sidwell.edu's net connection is so slow,  
the homepage will soon be mirrored on townhall.org, which has a T3 connection  
to the net, I believe.  

If anyone has any data or knows anything about visualization of the coral  
reefs, that may be relevant to our study, please feel free to email here at  
adam at earthvision.svsu.edu. 

Thank you,  

Adam Frampton 
Sidwell Friends EarthVision Team 

PS- Here are the coordinates of the reefs we are looking at. 

Ball Buoy Reef 	25 deg. 19.067 minutes N 
		80 deg. 11.128 minutes W 

Triumph Reef 	25 deg. 28.60 minutes N 
		80 deg. 06.70 minutes W 

Carys Fort	25 deg. 13.30 minutes N 
		80 deg. 12.70 minutes W 

Looe Reef 	24 deg. 32.5 minutes N 
		80 deg. 24.00 minutes W