Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
CONSERVATION
BIOLOGY
MOSTEP/ STC- JPS, TSC
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
Conservation Biology: Our World Under Pressure
INTRODUCTION
This next two weeks we are going to study conservation biology. Conservation biology is an area in
biology, much like evolution and population biology that deals in particular with preserving life. In order
for life to be preserved we need to become aware of: what lives in our environment, what ‘goods and
services’ does our environment provide us with and how are we (the human race) affecting or threatening
the continuation of life in these environments. So, why should we care about what happens to other
forms of life?
Since our existence we have been dependant on what our environment was able to provide us
with. We were hunters/ gatherers, we moved from place to place just like birds migrate to find better
nesting places or feeding places. As all living organisms we are active participants in food webs and
chemical cycles. We depend on breathable air, drinkable water, and fertile soil to survive. In addition
ecosystem processes provide us with “services” such as storage and recycling of nutrients. We are lucky to
have all this.
* “Tragedy of the commons” Any resource that is free, such as water in the ground or fish from the sea,
that are accessible to everyone, may eventually become destroyed.
REFLECTION QUESTION
In your personal life, either as an individual or as a member of a family, describe
how your life style is a threat to biodiversity. Use what you have learned about land,
water, air and deforestation to supplement your answer and reflect on ways that
could you help biodiversity
FLOWCHART TO GUIDE YOU ON YOU REFLECTION
Importance of
resource to:
1- Humans
2- Other life forms
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Threats to Resource
1- Things that alter it
2- Things that are a
threat to it.
Effect of threat on
Resource
1- What happens if
don’t control the threat
Ways to solve this
problem
1- Individual level
2- Community/ global
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
Biodiversity: Is variety good?
Objectives:
1. Student should know what biodiversity is and why preserving biodiversity is important to humans.
(What is the value of biodiversity?)
2. Students should be able to outline specific threats to biodiversity and ways in which we can reduce
those threats.
3. Students should be able to distinguish between extinct, endangered and threatened species.
Resources:
Book: Biology Living Systems- Oram (1998) (Chapter 30- p 867, 864-869)
Environmental Science Activities Kit- Michael L. Roa (1993) (p 70-86)
Websites:
WWF- Biodiversity conservation network: http://www.worldwildlife.org/bsp/bcn/
American Museum of Natural History: http://research.amnh.org/biodiversity/
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
Teaching Model: Inductive thinking
Subject: Life Sciences
General Topic: Conservation Biology
Specific Topic: Our Planet under Pressure. What are we doing?
Grade Level: High School 9-12
Prior to this lesson students would have already covered different concepts in ecology,
population biology. The objective of the lesson is for students to make connections and
establish hypothesis about factors that are affecting the environment on planet Earth.
Materials: Multimedia projector/ SMART board/ White board or over head; PowerPoint
presentation and Handouts to help them think inductively.
PHASE 1: Data Collection and Presentation phase:
o Teacher will start with a Bell ringer activity. (What is biodiversity?)
o The teacher will then explain the activity to the students by telling them that they
need to look at the slides and find patterns between the slides in each bundle. (E.g.
Bundle A = Slide 1-4, Bundle B = slide 5-8, etc) After doing this s/he will start
the PowerPoint presentation. This presentation has various images bundled in
group of four. There are a total of 16 images.
PHASE 2: Examining and Enumerating data
o The students will watch each bundle of slides as the teacher jumps slowly from
one slide to the next. The teacher may need to explain a little more about certain
slides if students are not familiar with the image.
PHASE 3: Classifying and Interpretation of Data
o A: As the students watch the slides. They will be writing on their handout, in
respective spaces, the associations they can come up with regarding each bundle.
o B: Afterwards the students will be asked to make connections between the
bundles and come up with descriptors to help them classify and associate each
bundle and slide in a different way if possible.
PHASE 4: Building Hypothesis and generating skills
o Based on their categorization the students will predict what factor is the most
influential with respect to the degradation/ alteration of the environment of these
organisms and will build hypothesis about what will happen if certain decisions
are made or not made regarding any of the encountered problems.
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
Biodiversity: Is variety good?
I. Probing a problem
A. Thinking about similarities and looking at the slide show determine some
similarities between the organisms.
Slide Bundle (A)
1. Similarities Between:
a. Slide 1 & 2
____________________________________
b. Slide 1, 2 & 3
____________________________________
c. Slide 1, 2, 3 & 4
____________________________________
Slide Bundle (B)
2. Similarities Between:
a. Slide 5 & 6
____________________________________
b. Slide 5, 6 & 7
____________________________________
c. Slide 5, 6, 7 & 8
____________________________________
Slide Bundle (C)
3. Similarities Between:
a. Slide 9 & 10
____________________________________
b. Slide 9,10 & 11
____________________________________
c. Slide 9,10,11 & 12
____________________________________
B. Can you see any further connections between the slides within a bundle? (Hint:
think about location, places, uses, status in the wild, etc)
Bundle A: _________________________________________________________
Bundle B: _________________________________________________________
Bundle C: _________________________________________________________
C. Looking at both groups (A & B) can you find any connections between these
groups? Explain.
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
D. Looking at bundle C, can you find any connections between these slides and
the slides in bundles A & B? Explain.
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
BIODIVERSITY
A- CONCEPT MAP: Biodiversity (Day 01 Summary)
Words: genetic diversity, species diversity, ecosystem diversity, medicine, food, clothing, fuel, cancer
drugs, blood pressure drugs, ecotourism, O2 and CO2 recycling, environment cooling, habitat alteration,
habitat loss, habitat degradation, habitat fragmentation, Invasive species, Pollution, Over Exploitation,
Human growth and development, hunting (commercial, sport), extinction, threatened, endangered
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
OHP Image 1
Activity: Part I- Data Graphing
Two sets of data are given in tables A and B below. Use the axes given below to make
line graphs of the data. Try this out in Excel! Neat
o Use a blue pen or pencil to graph data from table 1-A, using the left axis.
o Use a red pen or pencil to graph data from table 1-B, using the right axis.
Table 1-A
1650…..550
1700…..610
1750…..760
1800…..950
1850…..1210
1900…..1630
1950…..2520
2000…..6000
Table 1-B
1650…..5
1650…..9
1650…..7
1650…..12
1650…..27
1650…..70
1650…..124
1650…..??
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Graph of ____________________
6000
300
5500
5000
250
4500
4000
200
3500
3000
150
2500
2000
100
1500
1000
50
500
0
1650
1700
1750
1800
1850
1900
1950
0
2000
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
OHP Image 2
Activity: Part II- Threats to biodiversity/ Causes of Extinction
Images to discuss w/ students
Habitat Alteration
(i.e. habitat loss &
degradation)
Commercial Hunting
(legal and illegal)
30%
Pest control
7%
21%
Subsistence food
hunting
6%
Competition with
introduced species
(invasive species)
Sport hunting
16%
Captured to serve
pets (illegal
trapping)
Superstitious
beliefs
5%
Pollution
1%
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12%
2%
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
APPENDIX 1A: What the bundles are.
Bundle A- Endangered Species of the United States (Used to be there but it’s starting to
reduce in numbers)
Bundle B- Endangered Species of Missouri (Use to be there and is starting to reduce in
numbers)
Bundle C- Species that humans have used in one way or another to obtain drugs/
medicines to cure diseases.
Bundle D- Humans in one way or another are influencing or are using these biological
resources.
APPENDIX 2: Importance of biodiversity
The importance of biodiversity
• • We are eliminating populations and species faster than we can discover new ones.
• • We cut down thousands of acres of virgin forest before we have had time to
document or study what was there.
• • We replace our naturally diverse vegetation with artificial monocultures.
• • We are polluting our environment and changing background environmental
conditions faster than nature can respond.
• • We worry about the loss of species usually once it is too late to economically and
effectively do anything about it.
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Biodiversity and extinctions
•
Extinction occurs when there are no longer any living individuals of a species left.
•
There have been five periods of mass extinction's on earth 440m, 370m, 250m,
210m and 65m years ago.
•
Scientists estimate that currently, living organisms represent only 1% of all the
species that have ever been (i.e. 99% have been and gone)
•
We are in a sixth period caused not by meteorites or deep ice ages, but by human
resource uses - this process is super fast in contrast to all past experiences.
Views on biodiversity
•
Anthropocentric point of view for preserving biodiversity - some of these species
might have economic, medical, aesthetic, recreational, scientific or ecological value at
some future point.
•
Earth-first point of view for preserving biodiversity - each species, as a unique
product of millions of years of adaptation, has an inherent right to not be eliminated by
human beings.
Food for thought…..
•
Some 90% of all our current foodstuffs were domesticated and cross-bred from
wild stock found by trial and error by experimenting farmers & we principally use
about 30/70,000 edible species.
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Our World resources under pressure…What is happening?
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Insects are often despised by people, but many are very important ecologically not
only as pollinators of important plants and as bases of the food webs, but as predators
of destructive pests and for maintaining soil fertility.
A bitter pill to swallow…..
•
About 40% of the drugs and other pharmaceuticals on which our modern
medicine relies were developed in some way from the genetic resources of wild plants
and animals (often from weeds or things that are poisonous to us) - including the top
20 best selling prescription drugs in the US today (Raven et al p353) e.g. aspirin.
Don’t know what we’ve got till…
•
As many as 50-200 species are lost to this planet every day - 20,000 to 70,000 per
year.
•
It takes between 2,000-100,000 generations for higher species to evolve
•
We lack knowledge about species in the most biodiverse and at-risk areas.
•
We can only imagine how many species there are and what their functions and
values are (we know of about 1.75 million of possibly 13-14 million)
….it’s gone!
•
More than 90% of the plants we know about have never been chemically
evaluated.
•
The need of wild species for undisturbed living space conflicts with our own
needs and desires for the resources this space represents including the land itself.
•
The fastest growing sector in many developing countries is ecotourism which
relies upon the continued presence of pristine habitat.
It’s all in the genes...
•
The fastest growing sectors of modern agriculture and modern medicine are those
involving genetic engineering – without a sufficient gene pool (genetic diversity),
there will be inadequate raw materials to work from.
•
The more genetically diverse a species (i.e. the greater the variation in DNA
characteristics from individual to individual), the more robust it will be in
withstanding the environmental changes created by humans.
The rivet poppers…..
•
Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University compares our permitting of biodiversity loss
to continue as being equal to passengers waiting for a plane.
•
We contentedly watch through the departure lounge window as an engineer starts
taking the rivets one by one out of the fuselage.
•
When finally a few of us start to get worried and ask the check in agent if the
plane will be OK, she says - “Oh sure, don’t worry, the plane still has plenty more”.
•
Should we go back to our seats and keep on watching the airport TV while the
engineer continues his work?
•
(From the Ehrlich essay – The Rivet Poppers)
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