Category: Kappaleet

Should young people feel remorse over climate change?

• Read the Suomen Luonto column (in Finnish).
• What thoughts and feelings does this text bring out in you? Write a response to the column.

Where can you find reliable information about environmental change?

• How can you judge the reliability of information? Search online with the search terms “biodiversity loss” and “climate change” and pick five articles. Try to assess the reliability of each article, and describe why you think they are reliable or unreliable. Was there a difference between the two search terms?
• Use the same search terms on e.g. YouTube or Twitter. Do these results seem more reliable or less reliable than the previous ones? Is it harder or easier to assess reliability?

Metapopulation game

This game simulates the workings of a metapopulation, i.e. a set of connected local populations living in a fragmented habitat. The game is inspired by the life of the Glanville fritillary butterfly, which lives in the dry meadows of Åland.

Equipment

You need a playfield where you can mark the patches: a gravel or dirt surface is best. On a grass field you can mark the patches with ropes, or simply stand closely around the patch controller. In this case you need to clearly mark the patch controller with the maximum number of butterflies that can be in their patch at one time.

• 
  Make a card for each butterfly, with 5-7 different colours showing the different genotypes and the shapes showing the sex of the butterfly. Make 10 of each colour, 5 males an 5 females. Each patch controller takes all the cards of a colour, and at the start of the game distributes them to the butterflies starting on their patch.
• 
  Each patch controller (5-7) and parasitoid wasp (1-3) will need a pencil.

Players and assistants

Ideally at least 20 people in total. 5-7 patch controllers, 1-3 predators and/or parasitoid wasps. The rest of the players are butterflies.

Setting up

• 
  Draw 5-7 patches on the playfield. The patches are of different sizes and at different distances from each other. Each patch is divided into sectors like a pizza, and the number of sectors is the maximum number of butterflies that can be on the patch at one time. This number is the carrying capacity of the patch. The carrying capacity of a large patch could be 8, and a small one 2. The whole game has more patch sectors than butterflies.
• 
  Make the initial division: the patch controllers go to their own patches and the butterflies settle each in their own sector in a patch of their own choosing. One patch is left entirely empty. The patch controller distributes the cards to the butterflies in their patch so that half the butterflies are males and half are females. The predators and parasitoid wasps can start anywhere as long as they don’t enter the patches. Now the game can begin – all the players start at the same time.

Course of the game

The game is played by male and female butterflies, and their goal is to maximise their lifetime reproduction, represented by the total of the points on their card. Each butterfly starts with an empty card, with the colour showing its genotype and the shape showing its sex. The game starts with full inbreeding, meaning that each patch only contains a single genotype. Each butterfly can only mate ten times, and crossbred matings are worth more points than inbred matings. However, to achieve a crossbred mating the butterfly has to move to another patch, which has its own risks.

When a male and female are on the same patch and both want to mate together, they are free to mate at any time. To mate, they show their cards to the patch controller, who marks both their cards with mating points: 2 points for crossbred mating (different coloured cards) and 1 point for inbred matings (same coloured cards). The same pair can only mate once, and then at least one of them must change patches before they can mate again. Butterflies that get caught by predators or use up all their ten matings die and move off the playfield. The game continues until all butterflies have either been killed or have mated ten times.

Dispersal and mortality

To achieve crossbreeding, or when a patch goes extinct, butterflies have to move between patches (disperse). This is done by simply running to a free sector in another patch. There are two kinds of danger between the patches: predators and parasitoid wasps. Both try to catch butterflies between patches but are not allowed to enter the patches. Predators kill the butterfly by touching it, which puts them out of the game. The touch of a parasitic wasp means that the wasp gets to cross out the butterfly’s most recent mating points, and one of that butterfly’s ten matings is thus lost. (In nature parasitic wasps lay their eggs in the eggs or larvae of butterflies and kill them.)

Local extinctions

The size of a patch affects the likelihood that it will go entirely extinct. At certain intervals (for instance as many minutes apart as there are sectors in the patch), the patch goes extinct. To show extinction, the patch controller raises their arm, tells all the butterflies to get out of the patch and holds their arm up for 30 seconds. For as long as the arm is raised, the patch is closed to butterflies.

Goal of the game

The winner of the game is the butterfly with the highest mating point total. Try out different strategies (staying put safely and getting low value inbred matings, versus going out for valuable crossbreeding with an increased risk of premature death). Between games you can think up new rules or adjust the sizes and locations of patches, and see how that affects the game. You can also try increasing or reducing predators and local extinctions.

Concepts being demonstrated

•  Fragmentation:  patches

• Inbreeding and crossbreeding: different coloured cards

• Carrying capacity: patch size

• Local extinction: patch size and extinction frequency

• Maximising lifetime reproductive output: strategies to maximise points gained over the maximum of ten matings

• Intraspecific competition: the fewer sectors there are relative to the number of butterflies, the harder it is to find a free sector

• Parasitic wasps: loss of mating points

How has your local landscape changed?

• Look in geographical information services to find information on landscape change around your school. Have forests been turned into fields or built over, has land been reclaimed from the sea, or have fields gone back to forest?
• In Finnish Environment Institute’s LAPIO service you can examine Corine land use change data. Type “muutokset” (change in Finnish) in the search box on the right hand side, and the search will suggest maps showing change over different time periods. Pick one whose name ends in “muutokset 1 ha”. If you are on the right zoom level, coloured areas will appear on map, showing where changes have happened over the period in questions. Look at the landscape around your school: what changes have happened in 2012-2018, 2006-2012 and 2000-2006

The Corine data only shows change over the past twenty years. Longer term change can be seen in old aerial photographs. For Helsinki, they are available  here. Aerial photographs from the rest of Finland can be found in  Finna  using the search terms ilmakuva and the place name. Aerial photographs can also purchased from the  National Land Survey of Finland (in Finnish).

Find a threatened habitat type near your school.

• The second part (in Finnish) of the threat assessment presents all the habitat types that have been assessed. Use the maps and captions to find a threatened habitat type near your school. What is its threat level? What factors threaten this habitat type?
• Visit and photograph the habitat you found. How does it differ from its surroundings? Are there observations on laji.fi that were made here? Are there threatened species among these observations?
• Is the location protected? Check on paikkatietoikkuna by turning on layers under the heading Protected sites.

Information about seminatural grasslands and wooded pastures (”perinnebiotooppi”) can also be found from ELY centers, which are conducting a national inventory (in Finnish). Those of Etelä-Savo can already be found online (in Finnish).

Why do we know so little about how species are doing?

Study the Red list assessments, and find out:

• Click on the rows that have high numbers of NA and NE species. These species have not even been evaluated. Can you find whole species groups where not a single species has been evaluated?
• Find out what the categories NA (Not Applicable) ja NE (Not Evaluated) actually mean. Why have these species not been evaluated?
• What does DD (Data Deficient) mean?
• Can you find a species group with no NA, NE or DD species?
• In the species list, scroll through the DD classified species. When you get to a species’ page, you will find a link to the laji.fi portal. How much information on these species is found there?

What kinds of observations are citizens contributing?

• Go to laji.fi using this link, to filter the millions of observations in the Natural History Museum database down to just citizen observations.
• Click the tab “Map”. You will see a grid covering Finland, which gives the number of observations for each grid cell. Find your school – are there a lot of observations in your grid cell?
• Above the map you see the numbers of observations and species collected by citizens for the whole of Finland. Note them down. On the right side of the screen, expand the menu called ”Place”. Click ”Draw coordinates” and draw a rectangle around your school to select the observations in just that area. How many observations and species are listed above the map now?
• Click on the tab ”List” to see the observations you just selected as a list. Scroll around the names of the observers in the Gatherer column. Do you see the same names repeatedly? Try picking a name and limiting your search to just this one person’s observations, using the menu “Observer”. At the top right you can click ”Set filters” to see which filters you currently have active and deactivate the ones you no longer want to use. When you have filtered your observations to a specific person, you can click the tab ”Statistics” to see a summary of that person’s observations. How many observations have they made? Have they made observations over several years? Do they only observe certain kinds of species, such as birds?
• Tip: if you want to dig deeper into your search results, you can download them by clicking the button “Download as a file”.
• When you are done studying your selection, go to the top right corner and remove ALL the filters. Now you are looking at not just citizen science observations, but also all the scientific collections that have been uploaded to laji.fi. How many observations are there now? You can see a full list of all the collections in the menu “Scientific collections” under Advanced.

Ask the scientist

• What did they think of the article?
• Were they able to deliver the message they were trying to deliver?
• What do they study?
• What made them become a scientist?