YEAR 9-10 ETHICAL CAPABILITY
Whittlesea-Yea Road Photo credit: Monique Czaczun
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Native Victorian Wildlife are faced with many conflicts that test their survival skills. Animals in ecosystems depend on each other through competition, predation, commensalism, mutualism and parasitism interactions. Humans are not part of their native ecosystems, nor are man made structures. With the rapid growth and the geographic expansion of urban developments, what are the results on wildlife and biodiversity.
In the following activities you will be using real Victorian Wildlife Data to uncover the major causes of conflict for rescued wildlife. You will be unpacking the different factors involved in human-wildlife conflicts.
In the data sheets status refers to the IUCN Red List of threatened species and the categories are as follows:
LC = Least Concern
VU = Vulnerable
NT= Near Threatened
EN= Endangered
CR = Critically Endangered.
ACTIVITY 1: After accessing the data sets provided by Wildlife Victoria below, create a bar graph for ‘cause type revised’ and a seperate one for 'suburbs'. Ensure you use correct labels and include a figure label.
Examine your graphs by discussing:
What are the biggest causes of wildlife conflict in this data?
Which suburb had the greatest amount of conflict? Why may this be?
What ecological reasoning could explain the second largest cause of conflict? Link this to the findings in your suburb graph. Could it be due to urban sprawl?
Referring back to the data, Is there any correspondence of any conflicts to the time and type of species?
What could be implemented to prevent the second largest conflict from happening?
ACTIVITY 2: Visit the https://www.wildlifevictoria.org.au/ website. Scroll down to the map entitled ‘Wildlife Victoria April 2020 Cases’ and click Learn how to create your own or click the following link: https://support.google.com/mymaps/answer/3024454?hl=en&%3Bref_topic=3188329
Follow the directions on the web page to create your own map using the data set from Activity 1. You can add in each species by using the add marker button.