Global Forest Link: Engaging Youth in Environmental Analysis and Data Driven Story Telling.

Global Forest Link (globalforestlink.com, GFL), an award-winning environmental program, connects school-age students from the US and other countries in a dialogue about local and global forest change. GFL teaches youth to explore important environmental change issues by integrating space imagery and locally collected data, understand the environmental and socio-economic consequences, and to communicate their findings to peers and communities.

Initially developed as an educational extension of the WRI's Global Forest Watch platform, the Global Forest Link project has brought together over 1800 students from 100+ schools and youth groups in 7 countries. It was implemented as a component of established school curricula (in environmental sciences or biology) as well as a part of informal STEM education programs. Its goal is to nurture a new generation of "world stewards", who are skilled in modern earth observation technologies, data collection and analysis, evidence-based education, international collaboration, environmental advocacy, and journalism.

GFL learning modules are aligned with several Next Generation Science Standards performance expectations across Middle and High School Earth and Space Science topics, especially with the expectation that students learn to communicate information clearly and convincingly.

We demonstrate a combination of curriculum strategies and novel information technologies for cultivating the youth's ability to create compelling stories based on the integrative collection and analysis of information and to relay those stories in an exciting manner to a diverse audience. In particular, we will share our experience in introducing youth to modern software tools for collaborative exploration of forest data and to data science, such as SuAVE (Survey Analysis via Visual Exploration). These tools let students from around the world to view, map, and analyze collections of forest images and surveys gathered by their peers, and create compelling data-driven video stories about forest health mitigation and other environmental issues.