Tracking climate change one rink at a time

It’s been an educational winter for Stewart Fast.

When snowflakes first began to fall last November, the Ottawa PhD student decided to build his very first backyard skating rink. His two kids love to skate.

It’s not an uncommon ambition in Canada, where homegrown skating surfaces are timeless national icons; the training grounds of future hockey greats, where childhood memories are made in the Great White North.

Stewart Fast’s son and a friend lace up their skates on a sunny day.

“It was a bit of an experiment at first,” Fast says, “I was really eager to get it started.”

He overcame uneven snowfall, an overhanging tree that meant only half the rink softened in the sun, and the sheer amount of liquid required to fill in an uneven space.

“No one ever thinks about how even or uneven their yard is,” he says.

But around Christmastime, the temperature dropped, the ice froze solid, and the rink started to take shape. Now, Fast’s rink has gone from homegrown experiment to backyard masterpiece.

The 20 by 40 foot rink dwarfs Fast’s backyard, where it sits hemmed in with knee-high boards. After dark the ice is lit for night skating. One side is bordered by a four-foot plywood panel, perfect for bouncing pucks.

But Fast isn’t the only one who was watching the rink’s progress with interest.

Fast was one of the first in Ottawa to sign up with a new online experiment, launched this winter, called RinkWatch. Every couple of days for the last few months Fast has logged onto the RinkWatch website and evaluated the quality of his rink that day: Skateable or Not Skateable.

A casual visitor to the page is shown a map of the world sprinkled with little skaters, each representing a rink that is being monitored. If the skater is blue, that rink is open for business. Red means a rink too sloppy for skating.

As a result, it’s been an educational winter for some researchers in Waterloo.

RinkWatch’s map showing participating rinks. Visit rinkwatch.org to see current data.

A couple of scientists at Wilfred Laurier University launched RinkWatch in early February. They hoped that by regularly monitoring the skating rinks across the country, they could help track large-scale trends like climate change.

The website was inspired by a study out of Concordia University last year that predicted that because of climate change, many places in Canada soon won’t have winters cold enough to carry on the backyard rink tradition.

Climate change is a global problem and this website is zooming in to see what it means in your own backyard.

Haydn Lawrence is the graduate student who was recruited to build the website, and he’s doing some of his own research on the data. He says that by collecting such detailed information on skating rinks, it’s hoped the website will add to the research done by the Concordia report.

“What we’re looking for is to check on those facts,” he says. “We want to compare just how quickly skating rinks are disappearing.”

He has learned, for instance, that minus 5 is generally the benchmark for whether rinks are usable or not.

Although a full analysis of the data won’t be done until late March, everyone working on the project seems to agree on one thing: this isn’t just about what data are being collected. It’s about how it’s been gathered.

The project was the brainchild of Dr. Robert McLeman, an avid skater and associate professor of geography and environmental studies at Wilfred Laurier. He’s particularly interested in science done by ordinary people, or, citizen science.

“When we talk about nature in Canada, I get the impression that people seem disconnected from nature,” he says, “maybe because we all live in suburbs and cities.”

“We all watch the Discovery Channel and we see people doing great things with nature, like the crocodile hunter and things, but we don’t make any personal connection.”

But he’s always suspected that many people are secretly scientifically inclined. They just don’t know it yet.

A map of skating rinks in Canada that have impacted by climate change. Red dots are shorter seasons blue dots are longer seasons. The bigger the dot the bigger the impact.

“If you just gave them the opportunity to just dive in,” he says, “they would.”

Citizen science isn’t exactly a new concept. For example, scientists have long recruited birders for their prowess at spotting and counting rare birds. But Dr. McLeman says it’s been hard to take citizen science beyond bird-watching groups because the groups don’t have a lot of appeal outside a certain demographic.

“My impression is that people under 30 aren’t like that. That’s not how they engage with nature or how they engage with each other,” he says.

“They’re not buying a Tilley hat and joining a club.”

What young people are doing is skating and using the Internet. Dr. McLeman hoped RinkWatch would combine the two.

Most recently, interactive maps have become easy to create and people have become comfortable using them. It’s a combination Dr. Leman says is tailor-made for citizen science.

So far, his hunch seems to be correct. When RinkWatch was launched, researchers hoped they’d get 100 to 150 users over the winter. RinkWatch doesn’t track the demographics of its users. But this week, not yet two months into the project, they reached 950 rinks, tracked by 1300 users. They have been so enthusiastic about the site they clamoured for a place to discuss their rinks. New forums are now a virtual gathering place for rink enthusiasts to chat about topics such as the best flooding practices and swap pictures of their yards.

Of course, as far as scientists are concerned, the question with citizen science is always one of accuracy. There’s currently a rink marked in South Africa, a country that boasts an average daily temperature in February somewhere in the low twenties. (Granted, it’s marked “Unskateable.”) It illustrates the doubt cast over data submitted by users who might have motivations other than scientific integrity.

But Dr. Leman says that’s all part of the process. “That’s part of citizen science, finding out how accurate the data is, how many people are willing to do this, how many people are willing to do it responsibly. That’s part of the experience,” he says.

Graphs of the data gathered so far match temperature graphs for the same time period, which seems to indicate that the citizen scientists are onto something.

And Dr. Leman for one, believes a lot of people are there for the science.

“The measure of success of the project will be the core of dedicated users. And I think there’s a lot of hope there.”

For Fast at least, housing a small piece of climate change research in his backyard has been an eye-opener.

“It’s hard to connect climate change to day-to-day activities,” he says, but his rink has done just that.

“It’s interesting to see how it can connect to climate change…it makes it more real.”

Dr. Leman hopes enough people come to that same realization before it’s too late. Because Canada without backyard skating rinks? Well, it just wouldn’t be the same.