Abstract
Simple SummaryWe face serious ecological and societal issues that require a rethinking of our approaches to involving the public in problem-solving and decision-making. Researchers need help from community scientists to gather data and generate fruitful discussions to tackle planetary problems. However, the establishment and maintenance of strong links between scientists and society require innovative ways of communication outside conventional educational institutions. Here, we propose a game that teaches the players the basics of ecological thinking when approaching environmental issues and biodiversity conservation. The game is called EcoDragons and it uses dragonflies as the main biological entity to colonize, establish and maintain biodiversity in an empty landscape that regularly faces climatic and anthropogenic disturbances. While the current EcoDragons was based on European dragonflies, the concept is highly adaptable to dragonflies of other regions (changing the species names), or even to other taxonomic groups. Besides the various pedagogical benefits, the game has the potential to foster public engagement in biodiversity conservation and community science.Environmental education is crucial to tackling the pressing ecological and societal issues on our planet. Although there are various ways to approach environmental education and raise public awareness, games are potentially an effective vehicle of knowledge and engagement because they vulgarize the scientific information in a universal ‘language’ and bring people together. Here, we designed a game, EcoDragons, that integrates principles of ecology, biological conservation, life history, and taxonomy. The protagonists of the game are dragonflies and damselflies. The aim of the game is to colonize habitats with different species and use ecological processes (e.g., predation, competition, and mutualism) and conservation measures (e.g., restoration and reintroduction) to face random environmental disturbances (e.g., climate warming, drought, pollution, and biological invasion). The version of the game presented in this paper was based on European species. The game includes 50 species (25 dragonflies and 25 damselflies). The winner of the game is the one who occupies more habitats, establishes and maintains the largest number of species, and solves more anthropogenic disturbances. EcoDragons has a global outreach potential to educate the public about ecology, conservation, and organismic life history, and will probably engage people in environmental advocacy.
Highlights
Public outreach is an essential initiative to reach the ultimate goal of conservation biology and face environmental and societal issues [1]
Public engagement has a positive effect on biodiversity conservation and environmental advocacy [2,3], it is often challenging to effectively build a bridge between researchers and the public [4], with young students who will play a pivotal role in future behavioral decisions towards the environment and policymaking
The principles of ecology and conservation offer many opportunities to develop game concepts [11] that communicate many of the “must-know” concepts that the general public should be aware of [12]
Summary
Public outreach is an essential initiative to reach the ultimate goal of conservation biology and face environmental and societal issues [1]. The relationship of species with their environment, the importance of ecological and evolutionary processes to maintain biodiversity, and the need for conservation actions to protect natural environments and species against anthropogenic challenges are all aspects that improve ecological literacy and increase awareness of the public about the current and future environmental issues. The game offers 133 cards of three categories (Table 1) and a landscape with five aquatic habitat types It includes species cards (50 species), action cards (ecological, evolutionary, and conservation processes), and anthropogenic disturbance cards (climate change, invasive species, and habitat fragmentation). The aim of the game is to colonize empty habitats with species, increase species diversity, and solve randomly arising environmental disturbance with various action cards that involve ecological and evolutionary processes as well as different conservation measures.
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