What Happens

In this lab, students play a board game designed to introduce the concepts of disturbance dynamics and succession in plant communities. Students explore the dynamics of an imaginary ecosystem through the rules and outcomes of the game. Student randomly draw cards which present chance events and specific interaction scenarios to game players, the cards determine the path of succession taken by the plant community during the game. At the end of the game, students diagram the species composition and report on and discuss the reactions of different plant species to competition and disturbance events and the role of these interactions and disturbance events in shaping the plant community. Students can also discuss the veracity of the game as compared to real plant communities. To evaluate what they have learned, students play a version of the game where they play the role of land manager. They stack the deck to increase or decrease the occurrence of different types of disturbance events or directly control the sequence of events to produce a desired result, for example fire events simulating fire management. Because imaginary plant species are used to play the game, there are no regional constraints on where the game can be played. As an extension for more advanced students, students can design their own version of the game based on local plant communities.

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Lab Objectives

Through playing the game, students will learn that:

• different plants respond differently to changes in their physical environment
• plants respond to each other, and
• both of these influencing factors can shape the way a plant community changes over time
• random processes play an important role in plant community succession
• all of these factors pose challenges to natural resource management of landscapes in different successional states

Specifically, at the end of the lesson, students will be able to:

1. Diagram the changes in the imaginary plant community as a function of time, in the presence of environmental disturbances.
2. Predict the most likely outcome of plant succession in the imaginary plant community, following environmental disturbances or during periods of no disturbance.
3. Predict the outcome of land management strategies that increase or decrease the frequency of disturbances.

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Equipment/Logistics Required

For a class of 24 students working in groups of six:

• 4 Game boards
• 4 sets of game cards and
• 24 copies of handouts.

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Pre-lab Preparation

The Materials and Methods section in the “Description” has a list of all of the PDFs that you will need to print out in preparation for this activity. For each group of 4-6 students, make one copy of the Game Board (Figure 1 and Figure 2) on card stock and tape the two sides together. Make copies of the game cards on card stock (you could use a different color for each of the three types of cards). Make multiple copies (5-7) of the Event (Figure 3: Disturbances; Figure 4: Non-Disturbances) and Interaction (Figure 6) cards, and one copy of the Character (Figure 5) cards, per group. Each group will also need six assorted nuts, bolts, or buttons to use as game pieces and a coin for coin tosses. You will also need to provide each group with one copy of the rules (Figure 7) and each student with copies of the worksheets (Figure 8 and Figure 9).

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Summary of What is Due

As a minimum, completed worksheets, and a short report of findings of management “experiments.” Additionally, you could require a written report of students’ opinions on the scenario, and/or the students’ own version of the game using local or regional plants.

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Keyword Descriptors

• Principal Ecological Question Addressed:   How (and why) does ecosystem disturbance drive successional changes in plant communities over time?
• Ecological Topic Keywords:   succession, disturbance dynamics, theoretical models, resource management, restoration ecology
• Science Methodological Skills Developed:   theoretical thinking, model testing
• Pedagogical Methods Used:   active learning, guided inquiry, simulation game