Students are challenged to design a permanent guest village within the Saguaro National Park in Arizona. The design must provide a true desert experience to visitors while emphasizing sustainable design, protection of the natural environment, and energy and resource conservation. To successfully address and respond to this challenge, students must acquire an understanding of desert ecology, environmental limiting factors, species adaptations and resource utilization. Following theintroduction, students generate ideas and consider the knowledge required to complete the challenge. The lectures and activities that follow serve to develop this level of comprehension. To introduce the concepts of healthy ecosystems, biomimetics and the importance of sustainable environmental design, students watch three video clips of experts. These clips provide direction for student research and challenge design solutions.

This lab activity allows students to indetify macroinvertebrates and determine the health of an acquatic ecosystem.

This activity is a field investigation where students gather population data on bird species. The students will create bar graphs and interpret their findings. Based on their experiences and data, they will write an answer to the guiding question.

This activity combines field exercise soil collection with lab analysis of soil bulk density. Students develop a lab procedure to measure density and analyze data using Microsoft Excel computer software.

This activity is an introduction to population sampling techniques. Students' will identify weaknesses and strengths of a variety of techniques and determine the best applications of the various methods identified.

In this deterministic cellular automata model, interactions between neighboring automata are described using a prisoner's dilemma. Limiting dispersal of seeds of annual plants can permit heterogeneous co-existence, whereas thorough mixing instead allows one subpopulation to dominate quickly.

This article provides links to web sites that describe the Arctic and Antarctica in terms of geography, climate, and ecosystems.

This video segment from Greater Boston examines whether environmental toxins may be to blame for a rare skin disease.

This activity illustrates the carbon cycle using an age-appropriate hook, and it includes thorough discussion and hands-on experimentation. Students learn about the geological (ancient) carbon cycle; they investigate the role of dinosaurs in the carbon cycle, and the eventual storage of carbon in the form of chalk. Students discover how the carbon cycle has been occurring for millions of years and is necessary for life on Earth. Finally, they may extend their knowledge to the concept of global warming and how engineers are working to understand the carbon cycle and reduce harmful carbon dioxide emissions.

This activity is a field investigation where students will observe three areas with high sensitivity to pollution, and test water quality in two of the locations.

In this unit, students make regular journal entries about a plant/animal/insect community in the natural area around our school and use this to create a Non-fiction Class Book. They also interview family/resources to discover, record and present stories about human relationships with nature from their culture(s).

The purpose of this resource is to use a land cover type map to make environmentally sound decisions.

This activity is a field investigation where students find out what makes up soil.

This activity is a field investigation where students find out what makes up soil.

In this video segment from NatureScene, observe some methods of plant identification with regards to the diversity of hardwoods at the Congaree Swamp.

This is a field investigation on diversity of life where students count the number of kinds organisms in two locations. Students report their results on posters and propose reasons why there might be difference in diversity between the locations.

A collection of repeat photography of glaciers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The photos are taken years apart at or near the same location, and at the same time of year. These images illustrate how dramatically glacier positions can change even over a relatively short period in geological time: 60 to 100 years. Background essay and discussion questions are included.

This video provides a good introduction to the field of attribution science. Beginning with an introduction to weather and climate, it describes how severe weather might be linked to climate change and the science behind attribution studies. It gives a good explanation behind how scientists use climate models to study whether severe weather events were influenced by climate change. It also discusses the question, "does climate change cause extreme weather?" and provides an introduction to the concepts of probability, causation, and correlation in regards to attribution science (how much climate change influenced an event verses normal variations in weather).

This video segment from the Science and Technology Chat series focuses on dolphin pregnancy, birth, and care of the young, and features Atlantic bottlenose dolphins living in captivity at the Mirage Resort Dolphin Habitat.

This video segment from Kentucky Life explains the differences between dragonflies and damselflies and explores their habitats.