Tyler McIntosh is a researcher at the University of Colorado’s Earth Lab, where he studies disturbance ecology and conducts data analyses on forest structure and carbon storage in Western U.S. forests.
For his outreach project, Tyler created a Data Puzzles lesson plan on “Fast and Destructive Wildfires in the United States” which is published online at datapuzzles.org to accompany the journal article on which the data puzzle is based. Data puzzles are perfect teaching tools for middle and high school classrooms, illustrating real-world examples of field research and data analysis methods in a fun way in the context of recent scientific studies.
Tyler’s lesson plan on wildfire statistics conveys the necessity of disturbance ecology research to younger students, introducing them to a lesser-known scientific field and laying the groundwork for higher-level stats courses.
