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Direct link to Lopez ECHS Library's Online Catalog.
http://destiny2.esc11.net/cataloging/servlet/presentadvancedsearchredirectorform.do?l2m=Library%20Search&tm=TopLevelCatalog

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by Trevor Day

Focuses on the oceans and the beaches of Earth, as well as discuss their effect on the climate and their effect on their inhabitants.

Call#: 577.7 DAY
ISBN: 0-7398-5512-3
Grade: 6 and up

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Geography4Kids.com! The web site that teaches physical geography and earth science basics to everyone!

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Brownsville Public Library's (BPL) Online Catalog

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Brownsville Public Library's (BPL) Online Catalog

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Direct link to the Brownsville Public Library's Online Catalog
http://216.194.176.32:8080/#section=home

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Most of these databases may require users to access them through the LECHS Online Catalog link.

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Most of these databases may require users to access them through the LECHS Online Catalog link.

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Provides information on the ecosystems of a small selection of panoramas around North America.

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Geography4Kids.com! 360-degree Panoramas representing different biomes and ecosystems of the United States.

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by Michael Allaby

Explains key topics to young readers by using overviews, fact features, cut-away illustrations and diagrams.

Call#: JUV 577 ALL
ISBN: 0836827252
Grade: 7 and up

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Exploring Ecosystems with Max Axiom, Super Scientist

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Exploring Ecosystems with Max Axiom, Super Scientist

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by Agnieszka Biskup

Max Axiom explains the science behind the ecosystems.  (Graphic Novel Format)

Call#: JUV 577 BIS
ISBN: 9780736868426
Grade: 6 and up

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Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare: An Ecologist's Perspective

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Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare: An Ecologist's Perspective

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by Paul A. Colinvaux

Discusses the science of ecology to promote an understanding of the environment.

Call#: 574.5 COL
ISBN: 0691081948
Grade: 9 and up

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Defines the meaning of ecology.

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Geography4Kids.com! This tutorial introduces ecology basics. Other sections include the atmosphere, biosphere, climates, and ecosystems.

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Dictionary of Ecology and the Environment

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Dictionary of Ecology and the Environment

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by P.H. Collin

A dictionary that provides a wordlist of ecology and the environment.

Call#: 577.03 COL
ISBN: 1901659615

Grade: 6 and up

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Habitats and Ecosystems: An Encyclopedia of Endangered America

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Habitats and Ecosystems: An Encyclopedia of Endangered America

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by Mark Crawford

Focuses on endangered ecosystems.  Includes a roster of threatened sites.

Call#: REF 578.68 CRA
ISBN: 0874369975

Grade: 6 and up

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by Jim Pipe

Explains how plants, animals, and people affect one another and the ecosystems they live in.

Call#: JUV 577 PIP
ISBN: 1932799508
Grade: 5 and up

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by Michael Scott

This reference has vivid images and diagrams that assist in explaining the three different sections: Life-styles, Life on Earth, and Threats to Life.

Call#: JUV 577.5 SCO
ISBN: 0195211669
Grade: 6 and up

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An open access database that provides scholarly and scientific journals that may be accessed and used by the public.

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Breaking boundaries.Empowering researchers.Opening Science. PLOS is a nonprofit, Open Access publisher empowering researchers to accelerate progress in science and medicine by leading...

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by Peter D. Moore

Focuses on and describes the tundra terrain and its future.

Call#: 577.5 MOO
ISBN: 0-8160-5325-1
Grade: 6 and up

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A non-profit news organization that publishes articles that relate to or effect the state of Texas.

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by Asher Elbein

Discusses how drought has effected Big Bend's ecosystem.

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The morning after we arrived, we walked out into the parking lot of the visitor center to meet our guides. Sirotnak arrived with three others in tow - a volunteer, a seasonal ranger and botanist, and Maria Lavender, a park ranger. Together we buckled on backpacks heavy with water and followed them onto one of the many trails winding up the slopes. As we walked, the botanists pointed out trees and shrubs - the corrugated, scaly bark of the alligator juniper, the drooping boughs of its cousin, the weeping juniper, and thin, scrappy trunks of Emory oaks. We passed through meadows of pale yellow grass dominated by juniper and spindly oaks. A few hundred feet up a stone-edged trail lined with switchbacks, we came across a stand of dead piñon pine, gray trunks bare and flaking over the brittle ground. The piñon, not especially tall or lush, is not a terribly charismatic tree. But it is an important one, Sirotnak says. Piñon have historically made up a large part of the Chisos forests, providing shade for smaller plants and producing a fatty, nutritious nut that feeds both wildlife and people. This far south, piñons are confined to the sky islands of the Guadalupe Mountains and the Chisos. "We're right at the edge of where you can grow piñon," Sirotnak said, rubbing a needle between weathered fingers. "You go to a hotter environment, the junipers will still hang on, but the piñons drop right out."

The 2011 combination of freeze and drought affected not only the piñon trees. The damage to the forest was recorded in a 2014 paper by Helen Poulos, an environmental scientist at Wesleyan University. Poulos had been working with the park service since 2009 on a long-term research project that studied the Chisos forest's reaction to thinning and burning. As part of that study, she'd set aside control plots of land at various elevations in the mountains, counting the numbers of tree species within them. When she returned to the Chisos in 2012, she found something she hadn't expected. "One of the first things I saw up near the visitor center was this tree that had actually split open from the freeze," she recalled in a phone interview. "It was really surprising. ... Any place that you work in for a long time, that you love or that you have memories about, the plants there are kind of like old friends. So when you see all of these dead trees out on the landscape, it's shocking or upsetting sometimes."

In effect, she said, the freeze and drought had been a deadly one-two punch. Ice crystals grew inside many of the Chisos trees, wreaking havoc on the internal network that distributes water through the plant. When the freeze ended, melting ice left pockets of air inside the capillaries, which interrupted the flow of water and created deadly embolisms. In the drought that followed, the intense heat pulled water from the leaves, straining the column of water pumped from the roots. With little water in the ground, the water columns split under the pressure, causing more embolisms. The trees died from the tips back, their internal plumbing wrecked. Sixty-two percent of the trees in Helen's research plots were dead when she surveyed them. The Emory oaks and alligator junipers lost a respective 40 percent and 20 percent of their trees. But the piñon pines, one of the most common trees in the Chisos, were hit the hardest: 54 percent of the broad, brushy trees died, saplings and adults alike. The shrubs sheltering in their shadows wilted beneath the blazing sun.

The drought proved particularly devastating for the piñons due to a quirk of evolutionary biology. According to Dylan Schwilk, an ecologist at Texas Tech University working on the question of climate change in sky islands, pines are superficially tolerant to dry weather. "They have this amazing ability to shut down [during drought] because they have these waxy needles, so they can actually close their pores and stop water loss," he said. "But the problem is, if plants don't have their pores open, they're not getting carbon dioxide in. A plant's job is to make sugar out of air, and if they can't get that air, they starve to death."

Diebacks such as the loss of the piñon pines can have immediate effects, Sirotnak said. The pines are already largely wiped out from the South Rim of the Chisos, a sweep of slope constantly exposed to the sun. The rest of the forest there is suffering as a result. "Once you remove the shade, the ground becomes even hotter and dryer," Sirotnak said. Lose enough trees in an ecosystem such as this, Sirotnak mused, and the forest converts to chaparral, the welter of shrubs, stumpy trees and thorn bushes familiar to anyone traveling through West Texas.

Alternatively, the dieback of piñon may open an opportunity for trees able to bounce back more quickly from disaster, species such as oaks, which sprout in the mid-elevation forests in the Chisos or grow in the shelter of its moist canyons. Oaks are not as outwardly hardy as pines and junipers, perishing easily under drought conditions. But they have a secret weapon - dormant buds and deep carbon storage that can fuel regrowth after their branches die. Schwilk said that while they might be more susceptible to dry weather in the short term, they could end up replacing the piñons in the long term.

The effects of such a transition are hard to pin down, Schwilk continued. Birds will miss the canopies created by pines, and the loss of their piñon nuts may also affect wildlife. But a bigger crop of acorns might offset the loss, and most importantly, the oaks will keep the ground shaded enough for smaller plants. A reign of oaks might prove the best-case scenario for a changing forest. Or the piñons could recover. "We get a wet enough decade, they might come back," Sirotnak said, then shrugged. "They might not. Nobody wants to run a 30,000-acre experiment to find out."

As we came over the ridgeline the forest shifted, and dead gray pines poked through the surviving junipers. We stood on the hillside for a moment, looking south. Up on the heights it was a pleasant 80 degrees, and a cool wind brushed our faces. Agave plants waved in the breeze on the dry hillsides. Clouds massed in the blue distance behind the snags, a thunderhead building over the hazy mountains of the Mexican border.

We entered the cool cover of Boot Canyon in the early afternoon. The valley sits in the lee of the South Rim, protected from the blazing sun and nourished by cool air coming off the peaks. The sheltered forest is thick with ice-age era refugees and specialized species found almost nowhere else in Texas - Arizona cypress, ponderosa pine, Douglas firs, tiny orchids that feed on leaf litter and the incredibly rare, stringy grass called Guadalupe fescue. As we hiked in, a profusion of lizards scattered away from our feet. A 3-foot rattlesnake stretched on a rock shelf above the trail.

"It stays fairly wet down here," Sirotnak said, pointing at the greenery. The valley is high enough in the mountains to catch water from storms, and suffers less evaporation due to facing east. As a result, Sirotnak said, "the summer frequently has actual surface water running down the bottom of the canyon."

He was right. We stopped to rest and refill our water bottles at a seasonal spring nestled beside the dry creek bed, the water pouring in a steady stream from a little pipe set between the roots of a broad oak tree. "We don't tell people about this spot," Lavender said. "We don't want people to rely on being able to refill their water here, since the spring isn't always flowing. You can get into trouble that way." The springwater had a flat, metallic taste, but it was cold and refreshing after the heat.

Boot Canyon feels like an oasis even within the comparative green of the Chisos Mountains. But while these forests didn't suffer as badly as the piñons, they're equally vulnerable to another drought-related threat: fire. The Chisos haven't had a natural wildfire since 1903. Before that, Lavender said, reports by ranchers describe broad swaths of open woodland inside the basin, kept clear by small fires that were likely ignited by Indian tribes to maintain the meadows. When the Chisos became part of a national park in 1943, fires were suppressed, in keeping with the general consensus at the time about forest management. Now the mountains are clogged with dead wood and bracken, and there's neither the money nor the political will to set controlled burns to help clear it out.

"It just became very, very expensive to do a prescribed fire, especially in this environment where you're so far from roads," Sirotnak said. "You have to hike everything in, probably have to have a helicopter standing by." After a 2006 fire got out of control on the South Rim, he said, nobody in the park service has even tried. Then the 2011 drought left more dead wood in the mountains than ever. "We can thin, but we can't burn," Sirotnak said. "If this forest that many people love went up in flames..." Sirotnak shook his head. "Put it this way: No superintendent wants to have their name attached to the great catastrophic fire of the Chisos Mountains."

In 2011, rangers closed the trails completely, Lavender said, worried that a stray cook fire would ignite the parched forest. There are still strict regulations forbidding campers from using fires, though the rangers said they often find people building them anyway. If such a fire does get started on one of the dry, windy mountainsides, Sirotnak said, it could easily rage into a crown fire that sweeps up the valleys and ridges, devouring everything in its path. The results could simply wipe the forest away in what Sirotnak ominously calls a full ecosystem conversion.

The photographer and I turned back after Boot Canyon; Sirotnak and the others headed further up to hike the battered South Rim. Retracing our steps out of the canyon, we marveled at the diversity of life around us. Cactus of every shape and size perched in the rock scree beside curled ferns and piles of golden oak leaves. Agave had sent up 9-foot stalks tipped with canary-yellow flowers, the petals buzzing with gnats, butterflies and the occasional jewel-like hummingbird. Fresh bear scat dried on the trail, and deer with velvet antlers grazed placidly on the bushes. When we reached the top of the ridgeline we looked back to see the thunderheads rolling over the desert, towers of black and purple clouds sliding toward us. Around us, oak leaves rattled in the wind.

Long-term climate trends are the most important factor in the Chisos' fate. The Southwest has been growing warmer and drier since the Pleistocene. The question now is what effect rapid global temperature increases will have on the Chisos. According to State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, there's a broad consensus in the climate models regarding a steady increase of temperature in the Southwest. There's somewhat less certainty regarding the possibility of lower rainfall: Nielsen-Gammon says about 70 percent of the models predict lower precipitation, but there just isn't a good historical baseline of data to work from.

"We think we'll still see the cycles of extreme wet and extreme dry in the future that we see today," said Katharine Hayhoe, a climatologist at Texas Tech who works occasionally with Nielsen-Gammon. Since 2013, Schwilk, Poulos, Hayhoe and others have been working on a U.S. Department of the Interior-funded project to study the effects of climate change on sky island forests. There's been relatively little collection of temperature data in the Chisos up to this point; the mountains are too remote and few people live there. Add in the complicated topography of the mountains, and it's hard to make local, accurate predictions. Certainly, Hayhoe said, the increases in temperature will worsen the droughts. "When it's warmer ... what water there is evaporates more swiftly from the soil and can evaporate reservoirs," she said. "So that exacerbates the impacts of the drought on the wildlife as well as on the plants."

What Schwilk's team uncovers will help answer the question of whether the 2011 drought marked a temporary setback for the Chisos forests or the start of something more serious. While it's impossible to predict the future of an ecosystem with any certainty, what is certain is that the forest is going to change. "Climate change is not something new," Schwilk said.

Conservationists and park officials have begun to realize that parks, far from being protected islands, are constantly affected by the landscapes around them, he went on. "So to pretend that you can hold things in complete stasis is a fantasy," he said. "And that's recognized. I personally think that there's some value in trying, even if it's not possible. You just have to be honest about what you're managing for."

Sirotnak and the Park Service are overseeing the park as best they can, cutting back brush, pulling up invasive weeds and trying to lower the risk of fires. "The reason we're concerned about climate change today is because it's happening so fast," Hayhoe said. "It's happening about 10 times faster than it did between the last ice age and today. And that could be even faster by the end of the century." For the people trying to manage the Chisos in the face of that level of transition, it's hard to do more than hang on for the ride.

Thunderheads rolled in as we came down the slopes. Clouds hid the upper peaks, shrouding the hidden valleys and sending double forks of lightning into the cliffs. Then the rain came, slow at first, then harder, falling in drenching sheets. The water poured down on a small piñon growing beneath a dead elder, droplets beading on the waxy needles. What the future holds for such trees, nobody quite knows. This time, though, the storm had come.

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As Texas Gets Hotter, What Happens to Environments on the Edge?

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The morning after we arrived, we walked out into the parking lot of the visitor center to meet our guides. Sirotnak arrived with three others in tow - a volunteer, a seasonal ranger and botanist, and Maria Lavender, a park ranger.

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by Hannah McBride

An article that mentions how a fire scorched 7 square miles of Bastrop County and how it has left an everlasting effect on the HiddenPines ecosystem.

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Making matters worse is population growth among the pines. Not only does more people mean more lives and property at risk; it also means that fire prevention and mitigation becomes more challenging. The task of removing excess brush, grass and trees - the fuel for wildfires - falls in large part to increasing number of individual landowners, requiring a tremendous amount of coordination and expense.

According to the Texas Forest Service, only one fire burned more than 5,000 acres from 1985 to 2000. But in the last 15 years, Texas has seen fires of that size almost every year. In 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2011, there were 10 or more fires that damaged more than 5,000 acres.

"We see our rainfall patterns shifting and increasing risk of higher temperatures, which exacerbate our already frequent dry conditions," Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, wrote in an email to the . "Texas has always been vulnerable to wildfires. With our rapidly expanding population, and our changing climate, the risks posed by wildfire are not going away any time soon."

Fire has always been a natural hazard in Texas, but an apparent increase in extreme dry periods followed by extreme wet periods has exacerbated the problem. Wet growing seasons fuel lots of plant growth and then drought kills off the vegetation.

" There's no checks and balances," said Justice Jones, manager of the Wildlife Fire Mitigation division of the Austin Fire Department . "Fuel grows, it dies, and it waits for the wildfire season."

In 2011, the state's worst single-year drought contributed to the Bastrop County Complex Fire. This year, a wet spring and early summer was followed by a very dry spell that plunged the Bastrop area into a severe drought, said s tate climatologist John Nielson-Gammon. For the past 110 days, Smithville has had just 1.19 inches of rain, eight times less than the average amount and the lowest ever recorded for that time period.

Nielson-Gammon said Texas needs to prepare for fire seasons like other states plan for tornadoes and hurricanes. Unlike those places, though, fire can happen in Texas anytime.

"For a fire to spread like that, you need it to be hot, dry and windy," he said. "You can have hot, dry and windy anytime of year in Texas." During a panel discussion, Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, claimed that there's no correlation between climate change and extreme weather. Bastrop County, with its recent influx of residents, serves as a good example of the confluence of factors that cause wildfire: more people living closer to wilderness means they are closer to fuel and can spark it more easily. With so much at risk, fire mitigation becomes an endless, not to mention time-consuming and expensive, task.

"What it really comes down to is allying our human community with our ecological community," Jones said. "Where humans go, fires go. ... It's really time for us to confront that, rather than waiting for fire to come to our doorstep."

For nine years, Jones worked at the Texas Forest Service as the wildland urban interface coordinator, and he said a s homes are built in fire-prone areas, residents need to understand the high risk of uncontrolled wildfire.

"We live in a fire-adapted ecosystem. They're going to burn at some point," Jones said. "The problem for us is that species that don't adapt tend to go extinct. Not doing so would make as much sense as being on the coast and not preparing for a hurricane. "

Standing well over 6 feet tall and sporting a signature white cowboy hat, Bastrop County Judge Paul Pape has been holding daily press conferences on the Hidden Pines Fire in the Smithville Recreation Center. He's seen first-hand the increasing accumulation of what's called ladder fuel - brush, pine needles and debris that brings fire from the forest floor up to the treetops.

"What used to be fuel this tall," Pape said, holding his hand knee-high, "is now fuel this tall." Pape raised his hand a foot above his considerable height. "When the fire gets in the canopy of the forest, you can't fight it."

It used to be that nature could take its course and fire could burn out more or less on its own, taking scrub brush and piles of dead pine needles with it, explained Pape. Once housing began to creep in on the pines, area officials couldn't just let it burn.

"Because there's people living here now, we can't deal with fire the way we used to deal with fire," Pape said.

After the 2011 fires, Bastrop County rolled out a $4 million fuel reduction program partially funded by FEMA. The program pays, in part, for Bobcat-mounted flail mowers to chip through undergrowth on private property. But getting landowners to agree to it is part of the battle.

"I've had people say to me, 'Don't you set foot on my property, don't you cut one of my trees,'" Pape said. "That's the kind of idiotic attitude people have, so it's no wonder that this keeps happening."

Pape said everyday folks - the "Mr. and Mrs. Smiths" of Bastrop - who want to live among the pines will have to start working with, rather than against, the county on fire prevention. "Unless people start taking it seriously," said Pape, "I can't treat the whole 900 square miles of Bastrop County. Who has the time or money for that?"

The Hidden Pines Fire - and the fight against it - raged the same weekend that politicians and policymakers, just down the highway in Austin, took the stage to fight over climate at the Texas Tribune Festival.

During a panel discussion, Republican Congressman Lamar Smith, who chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, that there's no correlation between climate change and extreme weather. Bryan Shaw, chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, said temperatures have climbed in Texas, but questioned whether people are responsible.

But whether lawmakers believe in climate change has little bearing on reality, Jones said. Climate change is "undeniable," he said, and Texas is facing a growing wildfire threat that must be addressed.

"For the fire community, it's almost somewhat irrelevant. They know what they're seeing on the ground is worse than they've ever seen before," he said. "It might just be our new normal because it hasn't taken a turn for the better."

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Bastrop Fires Likely 'New Normal' Thanks to Climate Change

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Making matters worse is population growth among the pines. Not only does more people mean more lives and property at risk; it also means that fire prevention and mitigation becomes more challenging. The task of removing excess brush, grass and trees - the fuel for wildfires - falls in large part to increasing number of individual landowners, requiring a tremendous amount of coordination and expense.

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by Kevin Sieff

Discusses how shark fishermen are killing hammerheads and blacktip sharks to earn a living, but are disrupting ecosystems that rely on the existence of sharks.

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He paddled frantically, not sure if he was moving closer to land or farther out to sea. Within minutes, he'd lost sight of the other fishermen and the sharks.

Around 11 a.m., Hernandez stumbled toward the island's high-rises, squinting at crowds of spring-breakers. He needed to tell someone that his friends were still lost at sea, that he desperately needed help. Hernandez also feared he would have to answer a question that could complicate everything: What was he doing in American waters?

Hernandez lives on Playa Bagdad, a beach just south of the U.S.-Mexico border, where 25-foot fishing boats called lanchas and ramshackle huts line the shore. In front of his one-room shanty, dogs pick at discarded shark carcasses. A few hours before it sank, Hernandez's lancha was parked here, loaded with more than 800 yards of fishing line.

Fifteen miles of farmland separate the beach from Matamoros, the city of 1.2 million across the border from Brownsville, and South Padre Island, where Hernandez washed up. Despite its proximity to the United States and to northern Mexico's industrial sprawl, Playa Bagdad has no electricity, no running water, and no regulatory enforcement. You can catch, kill, and sell anything that lands in your hull-a scourge to the few environmentalists who know the beach exists.

"They're fishing in a prime habitat for juvenile sandbar and blacktip sharks," says Karyl Brewster-Geisz, a biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who produced a 15-page report on illegal shark fishing along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2005. "And unlike the U.S., where permits are issued for particular species," she says, fishermen in Playa Bagdad "take whatever they can get."

Scientists say a growing trade in shark fins is depleting shark populations around the globe and disrupting ecosystems long dependent on the predator's presence. On the Texas-Mexico border, shark fishing threatens more than the environment. "This is our sovereignty we're trying to protect," says Lt. Mickey Lalor, commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard's South Padre Island station. "These are our resources. These are our waters."

In the last decade, the Coast Guard has devoted a growing effort, now 60 officers strong, to deterring illegal shark fishing. That hasn't stopped men from making the dangerous trip north in search of sharks.

Playa Bagdad's fishermen, like Hernandez, earn about $15 a day hauling in sharks that will eventually feed businesspeople in Hong Kong and Beijing. In large Asian cities, a bowl of shark fin soup sells for as much as $100. The resulting surge in shark fishing happened thousands of miles away, where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico.

"Where there are sharks, we make money," Hernandez says. "When the nets are empty, we have nothing."

The opportunity attracts itinerants and career fishermen from all over Mexico. Most come for the sharks and the reliable income. Others, like Andres Hernandez, have more complicated stories.

Hernandez became a shark fisherman by accident. Six years later, he's not sure how it happened-how he landed on a beach 1,200 miles from home, slicing fins off some of the Gulf's largest hammerheads and blacktips.

When he left Chiapas, Mexico, in the early 1990s, Hernandez planned to score a construction job in Texas or California. There was money across the border, enough to send a check home every month, maybe buy a house or two in Chiapas. He rode for three weeks atop the tren de muerte, or train of death, which daring immigrants take from southern Mexico to the border, and was apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol. He tried again and again to cross the border-through farms, under international bridges-each time he was detained and sent back across the Rio Grande.

Returning to Chiapas would have been shameful, Hernandez says. With a second-grade education, he found only the occasional job picking okra in Matamoros. He was in his late 30s then, slightly hunched, almost frail-looking except for his calloused hands. A friend told him there would be jobs on Playa Bagdad.

After a few weeks on the beach, Hernandez discovered his friend was right. The demand for shark fishermen is unceasing. The job is so dangerous and so uncomfortable that few are willing to do it. When someone drowns or loses a limb to a shark, someone has to replace him. About 10 of Playa Bagdad's fishermen drowned in 2008.

Hernandez learned these dangers firsthand as he flailed for life, surrounded by the sharks that had spilled from his overturned boat.

On March 10, as usual, Hernandez's workday began at 5 p.m. He said goodbye to his girlfriend, Maria Elena, a quiet woman 20 years his elder. He walked out of their makeshift hut full of clothes and old coffee cans. The beach came to life just after sunset, when about 100 fishermen began preparing their lanchas for 10-hour trips into the Gulf. Next to the boats, decaying signs advertised restaurants and bars: La Novia del Mar, Disco Coco Loco, La Bamba. The former seaside haunts had been destroyed by hurricanes and tropical storms years ago. The beach belonged to shark fishermen.

Hernandez climbed into his boat, a 25-foot, open-top skiff called Relampago, or Lightning, with a yellow bolt emblazoned on its side. Two crewmates joined him. The three had been fishing together for more than a year. Hernandez knew the others only by their nicknames: El Pelon, for the particularly slick crew cut he once gave himself, and La Cherna, for his resemblance to a round, bottom-dwelling fish.

A rusty tractor launched Relampago into the surf. The crew used wooden pylons to propel themselves through the shallows before tugging the cord of a 10-year-old motor and speeding east through the Gulf. Thirty minutes later, they crossed the border.

At the intersection of the Gulf of Mexico and the Rio Grande, the fishermen saw no Border Patrol, no buoys, no flags along the river. In the distance, Hernandez could barely make out the pale lighthouse south of the Rio Grande-the only indication that the lancha had entered American waters. This night, Hernandez says they drifted north unintentionally, after a strong current overwhelmed the motor. But it's typically no accident when Playa Bagdad's fishermen cross the border. It's to hunt sharks.

Playa Bagdad's fishermen have concocted all kinds of explanations for the productivity of American waters. They credit the wind and the tides. They point to the reefs where fish are the most dense. At the core of their reasoning, most fishermen claim that U.S. environmental regulations have preserved the shark population north of the border. "We're poor Mexicans. We catch anything we can sell," Hernandez says. "And after a while, we caught everything in Mexico. With American regulations, there are still sharks to catch on the other side."

Jose Leonardo Castillo-Geniz, a leading shark biologist at the National Fisheries Institute of Mexico, studied the Playa Bagdad fishermen over several years in the 1990s. They came to know Castillo-Geniz well, sometimes beckoning to him from across the beach. "Hey biologist," they would yell, pointing to a freshly caught pile of sharks, "these sharks are gringos."

Castillo-Geniz never established why fishermen took great risks to pursue American sharks-the gringos-across the border. "Maybe they know about nursing areas where adults mate and give birth," he says. "Or maybe the competition for fishery grounds obligate some fishermen to catch sharks in U.S. waters."

The biologist's concern was not where the sharks were caught, but how lack of oversight had led to overfishing of several economically and culturally important shark species. If regulations aren't implemented in Mexican fisheries, particularly along the border, Castillo-Geniz fears those populations could collapse. On Playa Bagdad, he documented a decrease in catch sizes and a high number of infants and pregnant females being caught commercially-clear signs that the fishery isn't sustainable.

There's a painful irony in the exhaustive pursuit of sharks in Mexico-where the Olmecs and Aztecs once consecrated the fish. Later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, sharks were one of the country's cheapest sources of animal protein, making it a staple in poor, coastal communities. In the 21st century, Asian demand for shark fin soup is driving the price of the fish higher and drawing more fishermen into the trade.

When Castillo-Geniz published his report in 1998, he and other biologists at the National Fisheries Institute used it to lobby for increased regulations of Mexico's artisanal fisheries. His efforts to create Normas Oficiales Mexicanas have repeatedly failed, he says, because of pressure from the commercial fishing industry on the country's politicians. The situation is urgent, Castillo-Geniz says: If Mexico doesn't get stricter with shark fishermen, and if the fishermen continue to cast their nets across the border, the Gulf's biodiversity could be threatened.

Just off the coast of South Texas, Mexican shark fishermen play a high stakes game of cat and mouse with the U.S. Coast Guard. Watch the Coast Guard's aerial footage of a chase along the border, with photos by Daniel Lopez and Kevin Sieff. Produced by Kevin Sieff.

In 2007, Science magazine published a report arguing that overfishing large sharks had destroyed native species in the Atlantic. The authors, five marine biologists, reported that typical prey of hammerheads, duskies and other sharks-like the cownose ray-are thriving with fewer predators in the water. In turn, those animals are destroying mollusk populations along the Eastern Seaboard. Scientists call the phenomenon a "trophic cascade"-one likely to be repeated in the Gulf.

"The decline of the great sharks matters to the ocean's ecosystems," says Charles Peterson, one of the Science report's authors and a professor of marine biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "In this case, overfishing of these sharks led to the loss of a fishery for shellfish and the loss of services that industry provided to fishermen and customers." During a single month, Peterson said, cownose rays-no longer kept in check by a healthy shark population-consumed enough bay scallops to close a 100-year-old fishery off the coast of North Carolina.

In the Gulf, Peterson worries, the same phenomenon might be accelerating. "When you have fishermen who are entirely dependent on shark fishing, so that there are no other options for you, that becomes a significant issue," he says.

Some time around midnight, the three men on Hernandez's lancha tossed 800 yards of fishing line with dozens of dangling hooks over the boat's rails. In American waters, the key is to unload quickly, set up the line in known avenues for migratory sharks, and keep an eye out for U.S. Coast Guard boats.

The sharks swam by in schools, groups of 10 or 15 at a time, causing explosions of whitewater. The men waited in darkness for the catch to collect. In less than an hour, the seas had grown rougher. Swells buffeted the tiny skiff as the fishermen filled the hull with sharks. The temperature dropped. The wind rose to a howl, knocking the three men off balance. But the sharks kept coming, so the crew agreed to wait it out.

The catch was one of the biggest Hernandez had seen. He tried to guess how many kilos they'd caught. Six hundred? Seven hundred? There were blacktips, hammerheads and sandbar sharks, almost all of them cazones, or juveniles, about 2 feet long. The crew would be paid 25 cents for every pound of shark meat and $15 for every pound of fin.

As he loaded the lancha, Hernandez was seeing dollar signs. Then he noticed the hull sinking, saw the boat start taking on water.

It was too late to ditch fish or gear. Water was coming from all sides, pouring over the lancha 's rails. A few minutes later, the three fishermen were swimming, trying to grab anything that would keep them afloat. The boat carried no rafts, no signal flares, and only one life preserver.

Hernandez drifted from the sinking lancha, staring up at the moon to gauge where land might be. He paddled slowly west until he saw what looked like a lifesaver ring. He reached for it, threw it over his head, and started his 11-hour swim.

Lt. Mickey Lalor, the Coast Guard commander, got the call around noon, after Hernandez was found by a Border Patrol agent. "Capsized lancha. Six miles out."

Lalor was used to getting calls about Mexican lanchas. At least twice a week his men chase down illegal fishermen at 30 or 40 knots, often blasting the outboard motor with a shotgun or firing pepper balls at the motors of fleeing boats.

Mexican shark fishermen catch more than 55,000 sharks in American waters annually, according to an estimate by NOAA. Keeping them south of the border has become the focus of the island's station.

Illegal shark fishing wasn't always a problem on the Texas-Mexico border. Mexico's first shark fisheries, founded in the 1890s, were on the country's Pacific coast. Even then, most of the catch was transported to Asia. But in the 1970s, as demand for shark fins grew, Playa Bagdad's fishery began to grow. Bagdad became one of the country's most reliable sources of sharks.

Lalor had coordinated more apprehensions than he could count. But this was the first time he had been called to save a lancha's crew, the first time he'd be trying to do shark fishermen a favor. He sent three boats-the same ones used for high-speed chases-to search for Hernandez's friends. The Coast Guard's plane and helicopter left Corpus Christi to scan the Gulf from above.

The helicopter found the lancha first. It was overturned, surrounded by floating debris. La Cherna was holding onto the boat, waving with one hand at the pilot. The helicopter dropped a harness and lifted him out of the Gulf. Officers took him to the Coast Guard station, administered first aid, and asked about the third fisherman, El Pelon.

"He told us the other survivor was within shouting distance of him," Lalor says. "So that really concentrated our efforts."

In his office at the foot of South Padre Island's 25-story high-rises, Lalor looked at a map of the Gulf on the wall, calculating where the current might have taken the missing fisherman. Coast Guard officers swept the area for almost 36 hours. When the sun set on the second day, Lalor called off the search for El Pelon. The station went back to its normal routine, running morning patrol missions to the border.

Not long after he swam ashore, the Border Patrol dropped Hernandez off at the Brownsville-Matamoros international bridge. That's always been the government's policy:
onfiscate the equipment and the catch (if they haven'
been destroyed) and send the fishermen back across the border. For now, there's no jail sentence and no fine for Mexican nationals who fish illegally in American waters.

Still, the costs are high for fishermen like Hernandez. Not long after returning to Playa Bagdad, he heard news that the Coast Guard had called off the search for El Pelon.

It was a Sunday. He walked to Playa Bagdad's plywood church.

Hernandez couldn't will himself back into a boat, which left him unemployed and with plenty of time to pray. "I hope my friend is alive," he recalls saying. "I hope he's across the border, starting a new life for himself."

Inside the church, Pastor Rafael Garcia leaned on a row of teal-blue pews, preparing to lead the Sunday service. Garcia, who divides his time between preaching and shark fishing, had done this several times in the last year-delivered a sermon while one of the community's fishermen was lost at sea. "It's a hard life we have here," the pastor said. "So much tragedy."

Garcia mentioned El Pelon briefly and obliquely, asking his small congregation for prayers.

Then he moved on to the scripture. Hernandez, who can't read, opened his Bible and tried to follow along. Through the church's open windows, he saw the Gulf ebb quietly.

For weeks, Hernandez waited for news of El Pelon. Hearing nothing, he started to hope his friend had somehow survived. Then he got a call from someone down the beach. A body had washed ashore across the border. The authorities needed someone to see if it was El Pelon.

When Hernandez met the group of uniformed men at the Matamoros international bridge, there was no body, only a photograph. The face in the photo was missing its eyeballs. It barely looked human. The torso was bloated and sunburnt. Hernandez recognized El Pelon's torn clothing, including a piece of orange rain gear.

"Yeah," he told the man holding the photo. "That's him."

No one knew where El Pelon was from-as with many of Playa Bagdad's fishermen. No one knew if he had family back home, wherever home was. Local authorities buried him in an unmarked grave.

"It didn't seem right," Hernandez says. "But what could we do?"

La Cherna wasn't around to help. Hernandez's other shipmate had been apprehended in American waters a week after being rescued by the Coast Guard.

Of the three crewmen, Hernandez is the only one still on Playa Bagdad. He's not sure if he's ready to fish again, not even sure he wants to live so close to the ocean after seeing what it did to El Pelon.

"But what else can I do? What else am I qualified to do?" Hernandez asks, raising his voice at no one.

Fifty yards from his hut, a lancha arrives with a boatload of sharks. Fishermen pull out their machetes. They slice off the sharks' fins and pile the bodies in a truck filled with ice. One fisherman slips a few peso bills into his pocket. Hernandez checks out the scene. He can't be sure which side of the border the sharks came from. He doesn't really care.

He sizes up the catch, watches the fishermen take the last shark out of the lancha. Hernandez shakes his head.

"Before we capsized," he says, "we had even more sharks than that." Kevin Sieff is an Observer contributing writer based in Washington, D.C. See his and photographer Daniel Lopez's audio slide show on Mexican shark fishing at texasobserver.org.

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On the morning of March 10, Andres Hernandez crawled ashore on South Padre Island, spitting saltwater and blood onto the sand. His clothes were soaked, torn, falling off his slim frame. He tried to get the attention of tourists sunbathing ...

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by Forrest Wilder

Discusses the role that rivers in Texas play in the stability of ecosystems.

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By the time we hauled our boats up on the bank at John's Marina near Dryden six days later, we'd seen just two other groups on the water. It was about as pure a wilderness river trip as one can expect anywhere, much less in Texas. Few have the time, resources, or even the desire to run the Lower Canyons. And I feel privileged to have experienced it.

I relate this tale because the chance to protect Texas rivers, and the coastal bays and estuaries that they nurture, is slipping away. Most rivers in Texas can't rely on their remoteness to insulate them from exploding population pressures, worsening droughts, and the small-mindedness of certain commercial interests. Increasingly, our rivers are called upon to provide drinking water, receive wastewater, cool power plants, support recreation and breed wildlife, among many other uses. In some river basins there are more water rights allocated than there is water during drought times.

By damming and diverting rivers, we've also altered the natural patterns of freshwater inflow into estuaries. That can lead to dangerous increases in salinity and reduced productivity of shrimp, crabs, oysters and gamefish. Rivers were meant to flow into the sea and when they don't Mother Nature has a way of cruelly correcting us.

Spring freshets, those blessed rainfall events that lead to runoff, not only flush out streams but pump freshwater into estuaries at a critical time in the life-cycle of the species that grow there. They also help salinity-sensitive critters make it through summer. Ironically, in 2007 the Texas Legislature created one of the nation's most innovative and promising processes for determining how much water is necessary to preserve the ecological health of Texas' rivers, estuaries and bays. Space doesn't allow me to explain the details of the process laid out in Senate Bill 3, but it's a complex blend of science, policy and politics. Environmentalists as well as development-oriented water authorities and suppliers bought in at the outset because both water suppliers and environmentalists wanted some "certainty" about the future, Ken Kramer of the Sierra Club told me.

"Theoretically it makes a hell of a lot of sense to determine what the whole complex needs and not try to do it on an individual project basis," he said.

For each river basin and its associated estuary and bay system, teams of scientists and stakeholders work to come up with so-called environmental flow standards-basically a water budget that roughly reflects the natural cycles that species have adapted to over millennia.

It's a tough task. Almost all of our rivers have been dramatically altered from their natural states through pumping, damming and engineering. The goal is to figure out how much water is required for a sound ecological environment and take that into account when considering future water permits. Done property, with concomitant political support and forward-thinking leadership, the process could provide a framework for keeping our rivers flowing decades from now.

The best science suggests that rivers, estuaries and bays-all part of a complex hydrological system-require not just a minimum amount of water but certain flows at certain times in certain quantities.

"You need to have different flows at different times of the year," said Kramer. "You need variability: Base flows, subsistence flows, pulse flows, over-bank flows."

Without flow patterns that roughly mimic natural cycles, estuaries and bays can become too salty to support a healthy population of oysters, shrimp, crabs and other species.

In the profoundly-altered Nueces River Delta, one of the most extensive marsh ecosystems on the Texas coast, scientists reported that the effects of curtailing freshwater inflows over just three to six months can "become pronounced and stress effects may become catastrophic."

The process of drafting environmental flows started in the east, where there's more water, and has moved progressively westward. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, an agency that has become increasingly hostile to environmental concerns over the years, has the final say.

Now, after five years, we have a fairly good handle on how things have shaken out. The good news is that every river/estuary/bay system in the state except one (the Nueces) is currently considered healthy. (Although that's disputed by some conservationists.)

The bad news is that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality has taken reasonable recommendations, delicately crafted compromises and mountains of research and basically flushed it all down the toilet. In the case of the Trinity River, which flows through Dallas-Fort Worth to Galveston Bay, the agency adopted standards that the National Wildlife Federation calculated would reduce the Trinity to a trickle during future dry times, potentially jeopardizing the seafood harvest in Galveston Bay.

The TCEQ also low-balled the Guadalupe, San Antonio and Brazos rivers by grossly simplifying and reducing the environmental flow standards recommended by the stakeholder group (standards that were notably less than what the scientists had recommended). For example, on the Guadalupe River the agency dramatically reduced the number and volume of "pulse" events, "floods or times when the river's full in its banks."

Jennifer Ellis, senior project coordinator with the National Wildlife Federation, said she thinks TCEQ "reverse-engineered" the environmental flows to accommodate projects anticipated by river authorities. If water were set aside for environmental flows, it may not be available for future water supply projects.

The Guadalupe-Blanco River Authority as well as the Brazos and the Trinity river authorities all have designs on all or significant portions of the water rights not already allocated in their respective basins. That led some of the authorities to make an end-run around the other stakeholders. In both the Trinity and Guadalupe groups, a water authority faction broke off to support less stringent flows.

"Frankly in the case of Trinity some of us were a little too naive in thinking-despite being around for a long while -that everyone in the process would operate in good faith," Kramer said.

The TCEQ commissioners bowed to the insatiable demands of the river authorities, most of which operate as insular fiefdoms hell-bent on hoarding and selling water to the last drop. To arrive at its woefully inadequate standards, the state agency appears to have ignored the stakeholder recommendations so its reckless growth-at-any-cost paradigm can continue. The agency says it has to balance economic need with environmental protection. But that's precisely what the teams of stakeholders were charged with doing.

Five years into the environmental flows program, conservationists are wondering if it's back to the drawing board.

"If TCEQ is just not going to step up to the plate and actually do the job of protecting the river bays and estuaries then it really calls into question whether we can continue to depend on this process," he said.

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A River Runs Through It... For Now - The Texas Observer

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Ed. note: This is a lengthier version of my column that ran in the October issue of the Observer. Thanks for indulging.] In May, eight friends and I paddled for six days and 82 miles down a remote stretch of ...

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by Forrest Wilder

Discusses how the Lost Pines ecosystem has been effected by wildfires.
https://www.texasobserver.org/saving-the-lost-pines/

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Defines the meaning of an ecological system (ecosystem).

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The word ecosystem is short for ecological systems. An ecosystem includes all of the living organisms in a specific area. These systems are the plants and animals interacting with their non-living environments (weather, Earth, Sun, soil, atmosphere). An ecosystem's development depends on the energy that moves in and out of that system. As far as the boundaries of an ecosystem, it depends upon how you use the term. You could have an entire ecosystem underneath a big rock. On the other hand, you could be talking about the overall ecosystem of the entire planet (biosphere).

An ecosystem can be as small as a puddle or as large as the Pacific Ocean. That ecosystem includes every living and non-living thing in the area. It is several small communities interacting with each other.

Let's look at a puddle example. You might start by looking at the temperature, depth, turbulence, sunlight, atmospheric pressure, weather patterns, wind, nutrients, etc. Those are just the non-living things in the ecosystem of a puddle. When you add on all the living interactions, you have a good idea how complex an ecosystem can be. Even a puddle is an amazing place.

Scientists discuss some general ecosystem types. They call them biomes. A biome is a large area on the Earth's surface that is defined by the types of animals and plants living there. A biome can be partially defined by the local climate patterns. You may also have more than one type of biome within a larger climate zone. Here is a short list of possible biomes.

- Tropical Rainforest (Think about Brazil)
- Tropical Savanna (Think about Africa)
- Desert (Think about the middle east)
- Mediterranean Woodland (Think about coniferous forests)
- Mid-latitude Grassland (Think about Oklahoma)
- Mid-latitude Deciduous Forest (Think about the east coast of North America)
- Tundra (Think about frozen plains of Alaska)
- Ice Caps (Think about the poles)

Biomes don't just start and stop when they border each other. They all have transition zones that have characteristics of both sides. That zone is like a blending of two biomes. Scientists call it an ecotone. Ecotones can happen at the edges of forests, deserts, and mountain ranges. They are often easy to see because one type of world (many trees) changes quickly into another type (the cliffs of a mountain). While an ecotone on the ground may not cover a large area of land, climate transition zones between biomes are often very large.

Or search the sites for a specific topic.

NOAA Ocean Today: 'Restoring Coral Reefs' (NOAA Video)

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Geography4Kids.com! This tutorial introduces ecosystem basics. Other sections include the atmosphere, biosphere, climates, and ecosystems.

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Discusses how an ecosystem can go through many changes.

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Geography4Kids.com! This tutorial introduces biogeochemical cycles. Other sections include the atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, the Earth, and ecosystems.

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Describes the relationship between an ecosystem and its food web.

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Everyone plays a specific role in the food chain of life. You might be a human thinking they are king of the hill or you might be a bacterium under the feet. You are very important to the survival of the system no matter what role you play.

As you study more about ecosystems and cycles in life, you will see the terms food chains and food webs. They describe the same series of events that happen when one organism consumes another to survive. Food web is a more accurate term since every organism is involved with several other organisms. Cows might be food for humans, bacteria, or flies. Each of those flies might be connected to frogs, microbes, or spiders. There are dozens of connections for every organism. When you draw all of those connecting lines, you get a web-like shape.

Producers are the beginning of a simple food chain. Producers are plants and vegetables. Plants are at the beginning of every food chain that involves the Sun. All energy comes from the Sun and plants are the ones who make food with that energy. They use the process of photosynthesis. Plants also make loads of other nutrients for other organisms to eat.

There are also photosynthetic protists that start food chains. You might find them floating on the surface of the ocean acting as food for small unicellular animals.

Consumers are the next link in a food chain. There are three levels of consumers. The levels start with the organisms that eat plants. Scientists named this first group of organisms the primary consumers. They are also called herbivores. They are the plant eaters of the chain. It might be a squirrel or it might be an elk. It will be out there eating plants and fruits. It will not eat animals.

Secondary consumers eat the primary consumers. A mouse might be a primary consumer and a cat might be the secondary. Secondary consumers are also called carnivores. Carnivore means "meat eater."

In some ecosystems, there is a third level of consumer called the tertiary consumer (that means third level). These are consumers that eat the secondary and primary consumers. A tertiary consumer could be a wolf that eats the cat and the mouse.

There are also consumers called omnivores. Omnivores can either be secondary or tertiary consumers. Humans and bears are considered omnivores: we eat meat, plants, and just about anything.

The last links in the chain are the decomposers. If you die, they eat you. If you poop, they eat that. If you lose a leaf, they eat it. Whenever something that was alive dies, the decomposers get it. Decomposers break down nutrients in the dead "stuff" and return it to the soil. The producers can then use the nutrients and elements once it's in the soil. The decomposers complete the system, returning essential molecules to the producers.

Or search the sites for a specific topic.

Lake Temperatures and Ecosystems (US-NSF Video)

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Geography4Kids.com! This tutorial introduces food chains. Other sections include the atmosphere, biosphere, climates, and ecosystems.

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by Jim Pipe

Goes over the various ecosystems on Earth and the effect it has on animals.

Call#: 577 PIP
ISBN: 978-0-8368-8916-1
Grade: 6 and up

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Offers information on the various types of ecosystems (biomes), as well as organisms that reside within.

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biome habitat ecosystem ecology niche taiga animal printouts

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tundra desert tropical rain forest rainforest forests firest deciduous conifer chaparal chapparal animal coloring pages taigas cold forest boreal forest cold climate forest northern coniferous forest

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Habitat Animal Printouts. The Earth has many different environments, varying in temperature, moisture, light, and many other factors. Each of these habitats has distinct life forms living in it, forming complex communities of interdependent organisms. A complex community of plants and animals in a region and a climate is called a biome.

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U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Ecosystems

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U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Ecosystems

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USGS scientists have conducted scientific studies and research pertaining to ecosystems and have published their findings here.

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Ecosystems provides unbiased science, tools, and decision support to our Nation's natural resource managers, with particular focus on the science needs of the Department of Interior bureaus to conserve species, lands, and priority ecosystems; fulfill treaty obligations; provide water for irrigation and human consumption; and manage mineral and energy resources.

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by Greg Reid

Focuses on the wetlands and the type of life its ecosystem supports.

Call#: 577.68 REI
ISBN: 0-7910-7943-0
Grade: 5 and up

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What if there were no Gray Wolves?: A Book About the Temperate Forest Ecosystem

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What if there were no Gray Wolves?: A Book About the Temperate Forest Ecosystem

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by Suzanne Slade
(Illustrations by Carol Schwartz)

Explains how the loss of one animal can have an effect on an ecosystem.

Call#: 577.3 SLA
ISBN: 978-1-40486020-9
Grade: 3 and up

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by Lawrence Slobodkin

Defines ecology and examines how ecological change can have an everlasting effect on the organisms that reside within, as well as offer possible solutions to prevent disastrous changes.

Call#: 577 SLO
ISBN: 0-19-516286-2
Grade: 6 and up

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by Andrew Solway

Focuses on the food web within certain ecosystems and discusses the importance of maintaining the food chain within.

Call#: 507 SOL
ISBN: 1-60694-991-8
Grade: 5 and up

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The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Systems

An environmental systems web course that provides a full unit with lessons and activities.

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Resource: The Habitable Planet: A Systems Approach to Environmental Science

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Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum

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Hank, from Crash Course, defines what an ecosystem is and explains what makes up a sustainable ecosystem, as well as how the organisms within effect it and are effected by it.

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The History of Life on Earth - Crash Course Ecology #1

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by Marshall Cavendish Corp.

This set focuses on the various habitats around the world, as well as the impact that the inhabitants of that habitat have on it.

Call#: JUV REF 577.03 HAB
ISBN: 0761475230
Grade: 6 and up

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United States Environment Protection Agency (EPA)

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United States Environment Protection Agency (EPA)

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A government website that provides published informational articles and research reports about the environment.

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Contains book and journal articles, images and videos, diagrams and charts that cover various topics and subjects.

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Infobase Learning has databases and streaming video collections for every school, college, and library.

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Provides various databases that are partnered up with EBSCOHost and provides digital articles from books, newspapers, magazines, academic journals, and reviews.

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Sign in with your credentials to access the EBSCOhost premium information resources provided by your subscribing institution.

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BrainPOP offers engaging lessons over various subjects that involve both students and teachers in the learning process.

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BrainPOP - Animated Educational Site for Kids - Science, Social Studies, English, Math, Arts & Music, Health, and Technology

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Planet Earth as You've Never Seen Before (Blu-ray)

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Planet Earth as You've Never Seen Before (Blu-ray)

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An 11-part series that showcases the various habitats and its inhabitants around the Earth.

Call#: AV-Bluray Documentary
ISBN: 9781419851803
Grade: 6 and up