Climate Change and Risks of New Pandemics

TROP ICSU

Through this lesson plan your students will learn that human induced climate change causes biodiversity disturbances and could be responsible for the increased risk of animal virus spillover into human populations. Thus, the use of this lesson plan allows you to integrate the teaching of a climate science topic with a core topic in Biological and Environmental Sciences. The lab allows students to explore the impact of climate change on an organism of their choice by doing a diachronic analysis of data from Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

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Notes from our reviewers

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Review the learning outcomes for this lesson and decide where it could naturally fit into a course. The authors layout a clear pathway for implementation of this lesson, and it could be flexibly integrated into any undergraduate biology, ecology, or environmental science course.
This lesson delves into the underlying factors that contribute to pandemics, including habitat destruction and climate change shifts in biodiversity as causes for zoonotic transmission of infectious diseases. Students are presented with scholarly research to form the background needed before they research shifts in species over time. Passed initial science review - expert science review pending.
Although this lesson lacks assessment strategies and explicitly shows student engagement as the driver of learning, the content of the lesson will engage students. The resource is supported by: a step by step user guide, learning outcomes, questions/assignments, and more. The teachers should familiarize themselves with the activity (this will take some time downloading content, etc). The lesson is clearly outlined in a step-by-step user guide, that uses a series of three increasingly complex readings to introduce the topic and provides substantive background for completing the big data analysis activity.