Andrea Webster of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute prepares to take off on her bike with a sensor to track heat in Clarksville, including the community’s trails. Staff photo by Brooke McAfee
Andrea Webster of Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute prepares to take off on her bike with a sensor to track heat in Clarksville, including the community’s trails. Staff photo by Brooke McAfee
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CLARKSVILLE — As the Town of Clarksville tries to mitigate risks of extreme heat in the community, local students have joined the effort.

Students and teachers from Clarksville High School gathered with town officials and other community volunteers Monday to collect data about temperatures at various spots around the town. These heat patterns will be compiled into a map showing the hottest and coolest locations in the town.

The heat mapping project will help town officials as they determine where to plant trees in the community. The data will also be sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a company called CAPA Strategies,

The town’s mission is to improve the town’s tree canopy and find other proactive strategies to deal with climate change in the community and the growing issues of extreme heat.

The project is part of the Beat the Heat initiative started by Indiana University’s Environmental Resilience Institute and the Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs. Clarksville was one of two Indiana communities to be awarded a grant to develop a strategic approach to issues of extreme heat. The other grant was given to Richmond.

The volunteers made their way around the town Monday morning, afternoon and evening using both bikes and vehicles outfitted with sensors to track the air temperatures. The project included five different driving routes and two bike routes.

Clarksville High School senior Kat Lewis was among four students who completed a driving route for the heat mapping project throughout the day. She said she was excited to be involved in the volunteer project, and she hasn’t seen a project like this before.

“This is pretty cool actually going around finding the hot spots and cool areas of the city and gathering that area to put together and to just get those overall results to give us more information on how we can help in those areas to cool down the city more,” she said.

Bronte Murrell, the Town of Clarksville’s heat relief coordinator, was hired this year through the Beat the Heat program. The goal is to first find out exactly how extreme heat is affecting the community before developing strategies, she said.

“The reason that this [mapping] is so important is that you will see a lot of heat maps of a lot of different places around the world,” she said. “Most of those are recording surface temperatures, however, surface temperatures don’t really give us the air temperature, what someone is actually experiencing walking around,” she said.

“To be able to have volunteers to take the time on a hot day and record these air temperatures — we are going to have a heat map that much better reflects how people are actually experiencing heat,” Murrell said.

David Gardner, a science facilitator at the high school, joined several of his students to volunteer with the heat mapping. Throughout the school year, students will help with the Beat the Heat mitigation efforts.

He appreciates the partnership between the school and the Town of Clarksville, emphasizing that it allows students to get outside the classroom.

“Students get to see the business side, the engineering, the planning, the research that goes into how a town works and is laid out,” Gardner said. “Then you add in the science piece, and suddenly they get to see, oh, science doesn’t just happen in the lab, it’s happening out in the community.”

Clarksville Planning Director Jacob Arbital also volunteered with the heat mapping as he drove around the community with the sensor. The project is something found more often in bigger communities with more resources, he said.

“It’s really an awesome opportunity, because being a smaller town with a smaller staff, it’s hard to dedicate the time to an initiative such as this, just because we’re doing the day-to-day business of keeping the town running,” he said.

Arbital said the town’s work with local students allows them to learn how the town is responding to climate change and what it takes to develop a mitigation.

Murrell said the heat mapping project is an opportunity that many communities have not been given.

“In Clarksville, we’re really lucky to have this information and to have it as a source as we go forward in developing strategies to mitigating extreme heat,” she said.
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