Students are introduced to the concept of a dam and its potential benefits, which include water supply, electricity generation, flood control, recreation and irrigation. This lesson begins an ongoing classroom scenario in which student engineering teams working for the Splash Engineering firm design dams for a fictitious client, Thirsty County.

Students will be exploring the idea of ecosystems and wildfires. They will become familiar with what an ecosystem is and how to keep them healthy. Students will also see the positive and negative effects of wildfires on ecosystems. Also how wildfires influence the local government and federal government when it comes to land management.

Students experience civil and environmental engineering by planning a housing development in an existing biome, while also protecting the native species that live there. They conduct research, draw plans, make brochures and give presentations, with each team having a member serving as a project manager, civil engineer, environmental engineer and graphic designer. The best designs creatively balance the needs and resources necessary to support both the native species and human infrastructure.

Students perform a macroinvertebrate survey to gauge the health of a local river. They collect water samples and count macroinvertebrates to learn how the health of a river's ecosystem can be determined by its river insect population.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Although lakes cover less than 1% of the Earth’s surface, they are an essential component in the planet’s carbon cycle. But there are striking regional differences in the degree of carbon cycling that occurs in lakes, and the underlying causes aren’t well known. To improve understanding of these differences, an international research team has proposed a geographic framework to connect carbon processing at the ecosystem level with regional drivers such as climate, land cover, and human activity. Based on this framework, they’ve described two mechanisms that explain geographic differences in carbon cycling, providing new insight into the role of inland waters in the broader global carbon cycle. The first mechanism proposes that regional differences in lake carbon cycling are linked to whether water color exceeds a threshold level. Where these levels fall in relation to this threshold affects ecosystem patterns, such as lake metabolic status..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the basic types of ecosystems on EarthExplain the methods that ecologists use to study ecosystem structure and dynamicsIdentify the different methods of ecosystem modelingDifferentiate between food chains and food webs and recognize the importance of each