How can humans minimize their effect on ecosystems?

In this project, students explored the complex web of relationships within ecosystems to better understand their sustainability. Students examined a variety of ecological issues including the impact of human activities on ecosystems. They learned about invasive species and their impacts on established ecosystems and investigated how different management strategies affect the sustainability of fisheries. Finally, students suggested actions humans can take to help sustain ecosystems for the future. The final products were:

• a class discussion regarding their predictions over what would happen in 50 years if nothing was done to further influence the situations within each case study they learned about

• an explanation of what would happen to the food webs and symbiotic relationships in the kelp forest if senorita fish were overfished and no longer found in the kelp forest.

• and line graphs that show population curves for wild and farmed salmon over 20 generations at most.

Living Math (12th Grade)

As we dove deeper into geometric principals, we took a hard look at triangle geometry. One way humans can minimize their impact on ecosystems is to reduce their carbon footprint. This can be achieved by quite literally minimizing one's life- by moving into a tiny home! While this is not a very practical solution for most, it was a fun idea for us to explore. We constructed our own plans for tiny homes, utilizing geometric principals like congruent, isosceles, and right triangles as well as rotations, reflections, and translations.