“Scientific Modeling in Adaptive Management”? The title alone can feel intimidating, like industry jargon or insider language. But this collection of four research articles is really about something very simple – using scientific research to inform how we perform real, every day functions.
In this series of “From the Library” posts, I’ll be highlighting some of our publications, with ideas about how to use them in your educational plans. Today, I’ll be taking a deeper dive into one of our journals, “Scientific Modeling in Adaptive Management,” written for middle and high school students.
These articles are about balancing several competing demands – like how to make public lands accessible to people while also protecting important animal habitat, or how to balance the harvest of a valuable biomedical resource with the demands of a healthy ecosystem. When no clear-cut answers exist, scientists turn to models – simulations of possible outcomes using existing data – to help land managers make their decisions.
Read on for a quick break-down of each article:
Golden eagles, a federally protected species, and visitors share beautiful Denali National Park and Reserve in Alaska. Park managers, unsure of the impact of hikers on golden eagle nesting sites, turned to scientists for help. Scientists created models of different scenarios to determine how different hiking restrictions might impact eagle populations.
Public lands like national forests are used for a variety of purposes: timber, recreation, wildlife habitat, watershed protection, mining, and more. People who manage those forests have to balance all these competing needs, and they have to adapt their management as conditions change. Scientists gathered data about all these uses and came up with a modeling tool to help land managers prioritize their activities.
Red knots are migratory birds that travel yearly from the tip of South America to northern Canada and back again. They stop over on the mid-Atlantic coast for food and rest; this same location is also a favored breeding ground for horseshoe crabs. The birds feed on horseshoe crab eggs before continuing their journeys. But horseshoe crabs are important to people, too; their blood is used in important pharmaceutical research, and the horseshoe crabs are then released. Scientists studied how to manage the collection of horseshoe crabs to prevent declines in both crab and bird populations.
Scientists were on the case of the mysterious deaths of yellow-cedar trees. They carefully eliminated possible suspects until arriving at their answer. This information helped people who do forest restoration work come up with a plan to save the species.
How to Use This Journal
- Use the articles as case studies on how science is used to inform real-world decisions.
- Examine the steps of scientific inquiry, including controlling for variables, testing hypotheses, and using results to make next-step decisions. (Check out the Design Your Own Study page for more ideas.)
- Use the included FACTivities to give kids hands-on experience with modeling and adaptive management – weigh pros and cons of a land management strategy, create an illustrated model of your schoolyard, or decide where to place hiking trails on public land.
- Pair the Natural Inquirer article with the published research article it was based on as a tool to help advanced students read professional scientific writing. Here’s a lesson plan to get you started.
- Check out the middle and high school educator guide for more ideas!
