Welcome back everyone! Here are the newest officers for 2018-2019. From left to right: Ashley, our dependable treasurer, Kaylee, our trusted President, and Carolyn, our fearless secretary. We’re excited for a great new year!
After a relatively quiet summer, EcoReach is back to support our Athens-Clarke County community with classroom visits, activities around town, and our monthly public library events!
This post is coming out late, but we’re still excited to tell you all about our first event of the 2018-2019 year. This month we focused on food webs and ecosystems! What happens when you lose an important plant or animals within a food web? How would this affect the entire food web system?
To understand these concepts, we simply used a string. This activity involved attaching different parts of the food web with string and then playing out how the different organisms are impacted by one another. Some questions that we asked during this activity: What happens to the food web when you add a new carnivore to the ecosystem? How would this affect the smaller, vulnerable prey? Similarly, what if you added a new herbivore to the system, which only eats plant material? Will this impact the other organisms? Now, what you if you starting removing animals and plants from this food web system. Would it matter? How would we recognize any impacts? These are just some of the many questions ecologists ask everyday. Read this great article from National Geographic to for more information on food webs!
If you are interested in learning more about this activity and/or using it for your own classroom, send us an email!
We have a ton events already set up for this year. Last year we reached over 2000 ACC students and participated in over 30 events. We’re on track to maintain this momentum! Contact us to learn how to support our mission.
