Habitat Study Recitation Media Piece
Habitat Study Objective
Develop a study of a habitat that you could carry out over many years beyond this course.
Each module has included aspects of science discovery (exploration, description, explanation) and this media piece is planning for explorations beyond the course.
Media Piece Assignment
Long-Term Habitat Study
For this assignment you are developing a study of a habitat that you could carry out over many years, even decades. Select a habitat you could return to again and again. It could be relatively un-impacted by human activity like a wilderness area, something that is easily accessible like a city park, or even something human-made like an arboretum. The point is to watch nature change over time in expected and unexpected ways. It can be a habitat you impact, like volunteering to maintain trails, or one that you watch without intervention. It could be somewhere you take people to, or something that is just yours to study.
Include the following in your media piece:
(1) First, select a habitat. Describe the habitat, explain why you have selected this habitat, and state how often you plan to return.
(2) Next, predict the changes you expect to occur over different time intervals. For example, changes in organisms and/or environmental conditions you would expect to see next year, in five years, and in a decade. These could be natural or human-induced changes and they can be small-scale or large scale. You will be looking back some day to see how accurate your predictions were.
(3) Then, explain how you will collect data on these changes so you do not forget what you have observed from one time interval to the next.
Questions to consider: how will you observe changes? Will you take photos, journal your thoughts, and/or make a video with you in it so you can also observe how you change as well? Do you expect to see succession, with the community of organisms changing over time? What kind of disturbances could occur? What organisms do you think you will see more of or fewer of? How will you be impacted if this habitat disappears or changes significantly over time?
This media piece is a perfect fit for your portfolio so you can reference it in the future. Depending on how you develop this piece, it could slot into a Concept outcome (observing succession over time), a Skill outcome (describing a habitat in detail over time), or a Connection outcome if it links to other fields of study.
Your long-term study could include something that appears in a location every so often. For example, these fungi species send up reproductive mushrooms every fall on our land. We wouldn’t even know they existed the rest of the year because their hair-like hyphae are winding through the leaf litter. New species appear and others disappear. Controlling invasive blackberries and supporting tree growth makes it likely they will re-appear each year,
Media Directions
Submitted to Canvas.
Upload your long-term habitat study to Canvas. Your work can be submitted as a PDF, a word document, a photo of the notes, or even a video. Multiple assignment formats are supported.
