| Summary: | The current warming rate of arctic permafrost landscapes exceeds the global warming rate by two- to threefold. This leads to rapidly changing landscape changes like thawing of permafrost, erosion or thermokarst affecting the livelihood of indigenous people in the far north. Besides this strong socio-economic impact on arctic communities as well as flora and fauna, the thawing of permafrost leads to a vast release of stored greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Permafrost landscapes are defined as continuously frozen soil for at least two consecutive years and can reach depths of hundreds of meters. As roughly 25% of the landmass in the northern hemisphere is covered by permafrost a vast land area is threatened by thawing and the subsequent landscape changes. In contrast to the visible melting of glaciers and sea ice, the thawing of permafrost in the subsurface cannot be directly observed. On the one hand, this complicates the scientific assessment of the climate impact on the entire Arctic. On the other hand, the largely invisible thawing of permafrost has consequences for social perception of the problem. The goal of this project is to improve the data basis on thawing permafrost with the help of high-resolution UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) and satellite images together with citizen scientists, especially school students (Fig. 1). To this end, school classes in Germany and the Canadian Arctic will collaborate on the analysis of high-resolution remote sensing data. The students will use a mobile application to map striking structures and changes in the land surface on satellites and drone images. Utilizing feedback from co-creative workshops with German teachers, concepts are being developed to introduce the different topics of this projects into school curricula of German high schools. This could be implemented in the form of project weeks, special topic classes or excursions of classes to research institutes for the practical application of the learned topics. An important component of the project is also the ...
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