Water Resources Informal Education
Education is one of the strongest pillars of CHNGES and, therefore, we continually pursue a variety of education and outreach research and projects. Furthermore, we believe in using as many of our resources as possible to maximize the development of educational resources. For example, Alumni Jonathan Oglesby completed a project in Niger, Africa to develop ways to communicate about water resources through pictograms. We used our stationary eye-tracker to learn how observers visually process complex karst diagrams, infographics, and photographs, and the effect this processing has on the interpretation and understanding of these materials. Specifically, we have been able to identify the characteristics of instructional visualizations that most successfully communicate about karst landscapes and examine the effectiveness of varying instructional karst visualizations to improve observers’ understanding about the development and interconnectedness of karst landscapes and their relationship to groundwater resources.