Stars and STEM Stories
EMERGE Training in Guatemala Connects Students and Educators to GLOBE Science
Over one week in July 2026, the EMERGE project brought hands-on citizen science education to Guatemala, training more than 2,000 students and educators to collect environmental data using NASA's GLOBE Observer app. The workshops connected local environmental and public health questions to global Earth observations and left educators with bilingual materials to continue the work in their own classrooms.
EMERGE, which stands for Environmental Monitoring through Education, Research, and Geospatial Engagement, is led by Dr. Di Yang, head of the GeoDI Lab at the University of Florida (UF). The project is supported by NASA through the Earth Science Division (CSESP) as part of the award "Forecasting Mosquito-Borne Disease Risk in a Changing Climate: Integrating GLOBE Citizen Science and NASA Earth System Modeling." At its center is GLOBE Observer, which lets anyone contribute observations of mosquito habitats, land cover, clouds, trees, and another 60+ environmental variables that support both local decisions and global research.
The UF International Center’s 2026 Global Fellows Program, which provides seed grants to faculty to conduct international research, Yang selected Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico to train local scientists and educators in Earth observation and participatory data collection. Guatemala was a fitting place to begin. Mosquito-borne diseases are a live public health concern across the region, and GLOBE Observer's Mosquito Habitat Mapper gives students a direct way to document breeding sites and link their observations to a global scientific effort.
The EMERGE team on the ground included Yang; Isidro Niño Olivo, educational advisor; Dr. Russanne (Rusty) Low, EMERGE project advisory board member; and Caroline Nickerson, EMERGE communications lead and executive director of Florida Community Innovation—working in partnership with Magdalena Waleska Aldana Segura, physics professor at Universidad Galileo and Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala and coordinator of the STEAM Guatemala program. Participants moved from classroom instruction to fieldwork, practicing how to collect, interpret, and share environmental data.
To extend the learning, EMERGE developed two bilingual digital textbooks with facilitator guides. The first, Data Analysis for Participatory Science, walks users through GLOBE Observer data analysis using Python and Google Earth Engine and requires no prior coding or science experience. The second, Participatory Science and GeoAI, extends the curriculum into geospatial AI and machine learning. Both are available in Spanish and English, at geoemerge.com/resources
Training educators alongside students is central to how EMERGE works. The goal is to build local capacity that outlasts any single visit, so that classrooms keep contributing observations to GLOBE long after the team returns home.
"Bringing EMERGE to Guatemala let us test something we care about deeply, that citizen science and geospatial AI can travel across languages and borders," said Yang. "The teachers we trained are now equipped to lead this work on their own, and their students' observations are part of a global record."
Aldana Segura worked alongside the team throughout the week. "For our students, contributing data that scientists around the world can use changes how they see themselves," she said. "They are not only learning science, they are doing it, in their own communities and in their own language."
Low, who helped develop GLOBE Observer's Mosquito Habitat Mapper, said the setting made the science immediate. "Mosquito-borne disease is a daily reality in much of Guatemala, and the students understood the stakes right away," she said. "Every habitat they map with GLOBE Observer adds the ground truth that connects what satellites see to what communities live with."
Nickerson pointed to how quickly participants took ownership. "What struck me most was how fast students went from opening the app to asking real research questions," she said. "When you give people the tools and remove the barriers, they get excited and get to work. Reaching more than 2,000 students and teachers in a single week showed us how much appetite there is for this."
To learn more about EMERGE, visit geoemerge.com, or es-geoemerge.com for Spanish-language resources. To start collecting environmental observations wherever you are, download the free GLOBE Observer app and join citizen scientists around the world.
Story and images courtesy of Dr. Di Yang, Principal Investigator, EMERGE