Black Rock Forest offers a wide array of scientific data, many of which can be accessed and used by teachers and students of all grade levels.  Since 1995, the Forest’s automated environmental monitoring network has collected a variety of data using digital sensors; other field data have been routinely collected by Forest staff since as early as 1930.  This collection of data allows teachers and students to directly investigate trends in a wide range of real environmental parameters and study actual ecological events.  Teachers and students can also participate in the data collection process in many cases.  From these experiences, they become stakeholders in the analysis of data that they personally collected.

• See a catalog of available data (pdf), including meteorological, environmental, and biological information.  Consortium members may obtain any of these data by contacting the Forest’s Data Manager.

• Learn about the Forest’s embedded environmental monitoring network.

• Access data from the environmental monitoring network using the Data Explorer, an online tool developed at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory that can be used to download and/or visualize environmental data from Black Rock Forest.  The ability to examine and use data to answer questions is an important goal for students that may be best learned with real data from real places. A series of Education Modules have been developed that challenge students to seek answers to real-life questions by examining data collected from the environmental monitoring stations in Black Rock Forest; the goal is to dig answers out of data and often students will find that there is more than one route to that goal.  More information about the use of and what can be learned from real data and real-time data can be found at this site.

• Data are also collected from the solar panel array that provides half of the electricity used in the Science Center.  These data include information about total energy and power production of the 24-kW photovoltaic array as well solar cell temperature and solar irradiance on the cells.  Teachers and students can examine energy production data from the solar panel array and energy usage data of the Science Center to determine the energy efficiency of the building.  Consortium members can obtain a password and link to access a real-time digital display of energy production, as well as all energy data, by contacting the Forest’s Data Manager or Operations Manager. 

• Access seismographic data from Black Rock Forest and other sites in the Lamont-Doherty Cooperative Seismic Network (LCSN) (scroll to the bottom of the page and select BRNY for the station to view the Forest's data).  A variety of seismic data from around the world can be accessed from this site, which also provides links to Earth Science curricula to use with the data for grades 8 to 12.