Climate Detectives

 CLIMATE DETECTIVES 2024-2025

Team name: "The Emerald Island Explorers"

PROJECT TITLE: "Thassos: The Emerald Island  from a Space View "

     Our school, General Lyceum of Limena in island Thassos, is actively engaged in the Climate Detectives 2024-2025 Program, an initiative by The European Space Agency (ESA) coordinated by Esero Greece. This program challenges students to contribute to research and conservation efforts for Earth's environment and climate.

         Thassos, also known as the "Emerald Island," is one of the most beautiful islands in the Northern Aegean, renowned for its rich history and unique natural beauty. The island stands out for its diverse landscape, stunning beaches, and abundant flora and fauna. Its forests combined with the turquoise waters surrounding the island, form a natural beauty reminiscent of an emerald. Additionally, Thassos boasts a significant cultural heritage, while the production of high-quality products such as honey, olive oil, and wine forms a key part of the local economy.

The preservation of biodiversity and environmental balance is essential for the island's sustainability. To this end, systematic observation and recording of the island's characteristics over time are necessary, utilizing satellite images from Sentinel-2 L2A  provided by the online software Copernicus Browser and official field surveys.

Our research question was: 

"How does the unique combination of vegetation and coastal ecosystems contribute to Thassos's identity as the 'Emerald Island,' and what are the implications for its environmental sustainability and tourism development?"

The research focused on four key areas:

1. Environmental Protection: Monitoring changes in vegetation and water quality through indicators like NDVI, which assess vegetation health and density, particularly in ecologically significant areas.
2. Disaster Management: Identifying and tracking phenomena such as wildfires, floods, and landslides.
3. Coastal Activity Monitoring: Analyzing coastal erosion and pollution using indicators like NDWI.
4. Supporting Tourism Development: Evaluating areas of high ecological or touristic value.

The data collected were used to develop this educational website dedicated to the island of Thassos, offering a comprehensive overview of its natural, cultural, and economic significance. The posts on the website provide the description of each indicator, the images of the years 2016 and 2024 used for comparison, the observations and the results.

   Additionally, we created 

• a descriptive video to articulate, analyze, and showcase our findings as a presentation with the Canva program in order to summarize the subject of the study and uploaded it as a video on YouTube and

•  a game with the program genially:  Find the pairs of (years 2016 & 2025)

    

Furthermore, we  designed 3D jewelry and a decorative object depicting an olive, the most important tree of the island, branch with the use of the online software program Tinkercad, to mark the importance of the school community's cooperation in environmental study and awareness.

To emphasize the resilience of nature and significance of Earth observation through space in general, we requested for current images of Thassos from the International Space Station with the program SallyRide EarthKAM.