Wildlife Management

With help, have students read about their favorite animal and learn about the science related to their selection. As a class, all students share their favorite animal and tell a favorite fact that they learned.

Your school has decided to adopt an endangered animal to live on your playground. Good idea or bad? Discuss the pros and cons.

Write a piece to explain why managing wildlife is important or not important in your opinion. State facts and supportive evidence to back up your claim.

Wildlife management specialists count wildlife to determine if the population is growing or diminishing and what to do if a problem arises. Organize a counting activity by setting students on the playground to count specific traits of students during recess (in place of different animals) such as students wearing glasses, talking with gestures, wearing green, etc. Collect the data and create a class graph.

Who is faster? Use this lesson from the National Wildlife Federation to have students determine the speed of different wildlife to that of their own. They'll calculate rate of speed and convert it to MPH.

When managing wildlife, consideration must be taken of food requirement and the carrying capacity of the environment. How Many Is Enough: Panther Hunt is a lesson plan where students must calculate the carrying capacity of a finite area as they take on the role of animals attempting to accumulate enough food to stay alive.

Things that people do can affect the world around them. People can reduce their effects on the land, water, air, and other living things.

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land, and they live in places that have the things they need.

Plants, animals, and their surroundings make up a system.

Things that people do to live comfortably can affect the environments around them. But they can make choices that reduce their impacts on the land, water, air, and other living things.

All animals need food in order to live and grow. They obtain their food from plants or from other animals.

Examples of observations could include that animals need to take in food, but plants produce their own; the different kinds of food needed by different types of animals.

Obtain information to identify patterns of behavior in parents and offspring that help offspring survive.

There are many different kinds of living things in any area, and they exist in different places on land and in water.

The emphasis is on the diversity of living things in each of a variety of different habitats.

Examples of evidence could include needs and characteristics of the animals and habitats involved. The organisms and their habitat make up a system in which the parts depend on each other.

A variety of natural hazards result from natural processes. Humans cannot eliminate natural hazards but can take steps to reduce their impacts.

Being part of a group helps animals obtain food, defend themselves, and cope with changes.

Reproduction is essential to the continued existence of every kind of organism.

Changes animals go through during their life form a pattern.

Examples of renewable energy resources could include wind energy, water behind dams, and sunlight; non-renewable energy resources are fossil fuels and atomic energy. Examples of environmental effects could include biological effects from moving parts, erosion, change of habitat, and pollution.

Human activities in agriculture, industry, and everyday life have effects on the land, vegetation, streams, ocean, air, and even outer space. Individuals and communities can often mitigate these effects through innovation and technology.

When the environment changes in ways that affect a place's physical characteristics, temperature, or availability of food and water, some animals survive and reproduce, others move to new locations, yet others move into the transformed environment, and some die. Populations live in a variety of habitats, and change in those habitats affects the organisms living there.

Populations of animals are classified by their characteristics. Animals that have better camouflage coloration than other animals may be more likely to survive and therefore more likely to leave offspring.

The food of almost any kind of animal can be traced back to plants. Organisms are related in food webs in which some animals eat plants for food and other animals eat the animals that eat plants. Decomposition eventually restores (recycles) some materials back to the soil. Newly introduced species can damage the balance of an ecosystem. Organisms can survive only in environments in which their particular needs are met. A healthy ecosystem is one in which multiple species of different types are each able to meet their needs in a relatively stable web of life.

Human activities can positively and negatively influence the biosphere, sometimes altering natural habitats and ecosystems.

Biodiversity describes the variety of species found in Earth's terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The completeness or integrity of an ecosystem's biodiversity is often used as a measure of its health.

There are systematic processes for evaluating solutions with respect to how well they meet the criteria and constraints of a problem.

Ecosystems are dynamic in nature; their characteristics can vary over time. Disruptions to any physical or biological component of an ecosystem can lead to shifts in all its populations. Emphasis is on recognizing patterns in data and making warranted inferences about changes in populations, and on evaluating empirical evidence supporting arguments about changes to ecosystems.

Food webs are models that demonstrate how matter and energy is transferred between producers, consumers, and decomposers as the three groups interact within an ecosystem. Transfers of matter into and out of the physical environment occur at every level.

Similarly, predatory interactions may reduce the number of organisms or eliminate whole populations of organisms. Mutually beneficial interactions, in contrast, may become so interdependent that each organism requires the other for survival. Although the species involved in competitive, predatory, and mutually beneficial interactions vary across ecosystems, the patterns of interactions of organisms with their environments are shared.

Emphasis is on predicting consistent patterns of interactions in different ecosystems in terms of the relationships among and between organisms.

• Organisms, and populations of organisms, are dependent on their environmental interactions both with other living things and with nonliving factors.

• In any ecosystem, organisms and populations with similar requirements for food, water, oxygen, or other resources may compete with each other for limited resources, access to which consequently constrains their growth and reproduction.

• Growth of organisms and population increases are limited by access to resources.

• Emphasis is on cause and effect relationships between resources and growth of individual organisms and the numbers of organisms in ecosystems during periods of abundant and scarce resources.