Wildfire, Ecology and Carrying Capacity

In this unit, students will consider how sagebrush ecosystems in Nevada have historically maintained relative stability in numbers, even after catastrophic events like wildfires. They will then see how the introduction of invasive cheatgrass by humans has disrupted this stability significantly. Students will consider solutions for the cheatgrass/fire cycle and test their solutions through a game-board simulation.   

Hands-on Activities:

• Each student represents one organism in the food web and must organize themselves into the longest food chain they can 
• Students play the part of either a sagebrush lizard or a resource in the environment to demonstrate carrying capacity and how environmental changes like wildfire can affect it 
• Demonstration of how fuel load affects fire intensity using toothpicks and cotton balls 
• Use tokens on a game board to represent how cheatgrass has affected the fire regime of the sagebrush ecosystem and test out how mitigation strategies work to combat these effects 

Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS):

HS-LS2-2 •  HS-LS2-6 •  HS-LS2-7 •  HS-LS4-6