Predicting peak fall foliage color is big business in New England. State tourist agencies issue maps, weather forecasters give daily bulletins and the tourist industry gears up for the annual invasion of “leaf peepers” who add more than $2 billion to the economy.

Many voices, many opinions – but how does one know, scientifically, that an area is at peak color?

David Lustick, assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education, confronted the 16 students in his science methodology class with this question. The students then investigated ways to collect and analyze data, develop a process to identify color and make a graphic determination of peak.

“The students and I became obsessed with fall color,” says Lustick. “The more we investigated, the more complexity was revealed – like an onion. Science provides a way to get your mind around it.”

For these future classroom teachers, the point of engaging in an authentic experiment – from posing the question to presenting and defending a solution – was to enable them to recognize opportunities for similar experiences with their students.

The grad students approached the problem from both an analog and digital perspective. The results from each revealed a high level of agreement between the two ways of quantifying color. Their data source: online webcams of scenic vistas.

“Our observations show a sequence of changes,” says Lustick. “The red, orange and yellow increase; green decreases. Then green disappears, followed by an abrupt drop in all colors. We calculate a ratio of fall colors to non-fall colors. Once the ratio rises above one, we have a one to 10 scale of peakness – what we are calling the ‘UML color index.’”

The project was funded by a grant from the Faculty Development Center and was presented at a conference of the Eastern Educational Research Association.