Tuesday, August 7, 2007 - 3:20 PM

COS 46-6: Communicating science: The Teakettle Experiment interactive DVD

Malcolm P. North, USFS Pacific Southwest Research Station

Student and forest manager access to current ecological information has been limited because research results often only appear in scattered specialty journals. Many scientists receive little if any training in communicating with groups besides other scientists.  While the Internet theoretically bridges this divide, searches often produce a mass of unfiltered technical information without clear local relevance.  This talk will present an example of interactive DVD used to communicate the multidisciplinary results of the Teakettle Experiment (http://teakettle.ucdavis.edu), a comparison of fire and thinning restoration treatments on ecosystem processes.  Video media, web links, and ROM publication storage are used to build layers of information that can be explored.  The DVD is organized with active links that allow the user to move from overview to specialized scientific results and from broad scale to more localized information.  Anchoring the content is a 30 minute movie targeted at a general audience which summarizes the experiments’ findings and provides ‘callouts’ to more in depth information in a library of pdf publications on the ROM. Five short special feature films provide more in-depth results about specific topics such as Climate Change and Forest Management.  Supporting all of the film material, the DVD ROM contains the experiments’ 30 publications and outreach material, selected seminal papers and relevant national and local web links. Free copies of the DVD will be available.  Interactive DVD is a useful new technology that may help close the information gap between scientists, managers, students and the public.

See more of COS 46 - Ecology education: Extended audiences
See more of Contributed Oral and Poster Abstracts

See more of The ESA/SER Joint Meeting (August 5 -- August 10, 2007)