top of page

URBANISATION ADVENTURE

Learning Intention:

To consider, compare and justify choices based on knowledge of food chains and organism relationships.

Student Activity:

In this activity you must become both and owl and a possum. The aim is to make decisions that you think will lead to your survival. The choices you make on this worksheet should be informed by the information below. There is bios for both the possum and the powerful owl which will tell you things like; diet, habitat, breeding and conservation status. There is also research from a scientific paper. This paper is based around powerful owls and their movements in an urbanising landscape. Use this to help you understand the effects of urbanisation and help decide what would happen to these owls in the situation the worksheet provides. You will also need to complete the questions in the resource section relating to a real scientific paper.

Animal Bios:

Powerful Owl

Common Ringtail Possum

 

Resources:

Urbanisation Adventure Worksheet

Read the following:

Comic

News article

Scientific Paper Abstract

Snippets of the scientific paper:

Key Terms:

Urban - in, relating to, or characteristic of a town or city.

Urbanization - the process of making an area more urban. In this case turning woodland to housing.

Ecology - the branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings.

 

"Understanding their [apex predators] movement is critical given the current and rapidly increasing rate of urbanization globally. Of equal importance is the understanding of what landscape factors allow these movements to occur. We used the powerful owl (Ninox strenua), an urban apex predator in Melbourne, Australia, as a case study to understand their movement ecology in urban environments."

 

Key terms:

Riparian - relating to wetlands adjacent to rivers and streams.

NDVI - normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) is used to assess whether the target being observed contains live green vegetation or not.

 

"Shorter movements with many turns were made towards the beginning of the night in riparian areas with high NDVI. This behaviour is most likely linked to prey handling, suggesting powerful owls are more likely to hunt early in the evenings and as such travel short distances while carrying large prey items. Transitory movements with limited changes in turning angles were the dominant movement state towards the end of the night. As owls leave areas of high NDVI, they quickly travel long distances across cleared land and impervious surfaces to connect to the next habitat patch where they then transition back into shorter step lengths where NDVI is higher.

 

This research highlights the critical importance of riparian vegetation and high NDVI areas in driving powerful owl movement and foraging in urban landscapes. Conservation priority should be placed on retaining and restoring riparian corridors as areas not only for powerful owls and their prey, but also for many other species that utilize similar resources."

 

Try to decipher the 3 paragraphs from a scientific paper! Put them in your own words.

 

Watch the video below of powerful owl’s flight tracking, where are the owls mainly living/hunting?Does what the scientific paper is saying match up with the video? Explain.

P1050531.JPG

Analysing and evaluating. 

Use scientific knowledge and findings from investigations to identify relationships, evaluate claims and draw conclusions (VCSIS111)

Biological sciences.

Interactions between organisms can be described in terms of food chains and food webs and can be affected by human activity (VCSSU093)

researching examples of human impacts on specific ecosystems

bottom of page