Science on a Sphere at The National Zoological Park Science on a Sphere at The National Zoological Park

Our SOS will be located in the Amazonia Science Gallery (ASG) ASG is … A 4,000 sq ft science education facility. An integral part of NZP’s public science outreach. Visited by thousands of people each year. Part of the Amazonia Exhibit and focuses on tropical biology. Home to working research labs where visitors talk with scientists. Host to more than 100 formal school programs each year and many informal ones. Host to more than 100 special events and meetings each year. Visited by many government, NGO and business leaders, decision makers and science professionals.

Our visitors first visit the naturalistic Amazonia habitat exhibit …

… then go the Amazonia Science Gallery, our science outreach center.

The dynamic SOS will replace our existing, static globe as the centerpiece of the Amazonia Science Gallery.

We plan to use a mixture of live presentations and set-pieces in our day-to-day presentations. The growing library of visualizations will enable us to customize live presentations for school groups, VIP tours and other special audiences. ASG is a major special event function facility and we will customize play-lists to the interests and needs of these special audiences. We believe that once our research scientists witness the visual power of the SOS, they will want to create their own play-lists for presentations to colleagues, potential donors, students and others. Content Delivery

Topics We Will Be Covering We want to use the SOS to help explain the effects of global processes on wildlife and the environments in which they live. Many of the stories we want to tell are about the work our scientists are doing in the areas of biodiversity monitoring and conservation. So, we will be trying out various combinations of visualizations to explore topics such as: - Changing global landscapes and the impact of change on wildlife. - Movements of animals (e.g., migratory birds, sea turtles and other marine organisms, elephants). - The impact of changing climate on human and wildlife environments. - The distribution and dynamics of the Earth’s biodiversity. - The emergence and spread of wildlife diseases.

We also want to explore “hot topics” to help visitors understand what they might be hearing about in the news and some things they might not be hearing about, but should. Topics such as: - The global amphibian extinctions crisis. - Polar bears and global climate change. - Emerging diseases that affect both wildlife and people, such as - West Nile disease, dengue fever and malaria. - Droughts, fires, floods, and unusual weather patterns. - Conservation and environmental issues, as they arise.

Future Visualizations We won’t install SOS until later this year. Once we see how things are going with the existing library of visualizations, we will give some thought to developing new ones. We have a number of data sets from our own research that could make interesting visualizations. These are wildlife-related, so would be something somewhat different for the SOS program. Interactivity We will set up 2-3 computer workstations near the SOS, each with a large selection of visualizations from the existing library. Visitors will be able to select the visualizations they want to see. We have been running a prototype of this system, with about 20 visualizations, for over a year.

Partnerships We have partnered with EPA to do a series of exhibits about how environmental contaminants affect people and wildlife. We are panning on linking these exhibits to SOS visualizations. In the very near future, we will be discussing possible programmatic collaborations with the National Museum of Natural History. As part of a long-standing partnership with the Latin American Youth Center, we will be bringing minority students from the local community to the SOS for special bilingual programming. We have an academic and professional development partnership with George Mason University focused on conservation biology training. The SOS will become an important component of our academic and professional training programs and will be a valuable resource in training the next generations of science educators. We are engaged in discussions to develop a similar partnership with the University of Maryland.

Evaluations We are undertaking a series of pre-installation evaluations this summer. We have also completed an evaluation on an animal exhibit about the amphibian extinction crisis, which is to be “paired” with SOS. A full year of pre- and post installation evaluations is planned. These will help us understand how visitors use the space, perceive the globe, and relate to programmatic content. We will make every effort possible to integrate visitor input into exhibit improvements.