Combining low-tech hands-on with high-tech computer simulations to model community dynamics in undergraduate ecology courses

Background/Question/Methods

Teaching community assembly processes can be a challenge in the undergraduate curriculum.  Many of the concepts are abstract and cannot be easily demonstrated with field or laboratory experiments.  Traditionally, faculty have often resorted to computer simulations to allow the exploration of the impact of various parameters on the model outcomes, but often, these models serve as a “black box” without truly providing understanding of the mechanisms behind the model.   In particular, understanding how niche, stochastic niche, and neutral processes play out can be extremely difficult.  Students often take a preconceived idea of neutrality as “nothing going on”, and are looking for precise answers to scientific questions.

At Adrian College, an undergraduate liberal arts institution in Michigan, we developed a combined tactile simulation using beads and simplified landscape, along with follow up computer simulations, to explain these models to upper level undergraduate students in a Plant Ecology course. 

Results/Conclusions

The beads and landscape board provide students with the opportunity to simulate metacommunities, local communities, dispersal between them, as well as local environmental heterogeneity and degrees of specialization.  After developing an initial understanding of these processes with beads, students were then able to use computer simulations to explore parameter space with an increased knowledge of what was going on behind the “curtain” of the computer program.

In the first year of implementation, students showed an increased understanding of these processes, particular neutral and stochastic components of niche processes, when using the bead model before jumping into computer simulations.  While we do not have a formal assessment of “before/after” or “with and without”, qualitatively the results were clearly better with the beads based simulation.  In this presentation, we will show how the models were utilized, provide samples for others to use, and select student quotations from lab write-ups to show the increased understanding gained from the bead models.