This was a very short week so it’s going to be difficult to adequately blog about, but bear with me. In class this week we expanded upon our discussion of reserve design. When I say reserve design, I mean effectively designing a protected area to conserve a certain species or habitat. There are many obstacles that come when you are planning a reserve. You have to consider the particular needs of what is you want to protect. You must create goals and determine ways to evaluate if these goals are being met. You must work with local communities to ensure ultimate long term success. And of course, you must operate within the confides of a budget, which more times than not is severely limited and prohibits all of the aforementioned objects damn near impossible to do well.
In order to illustrate all of these difficulties in designing, implementing, and managing a reserve, one of our professors cleverly designed an activity using Legos. We were each given a set of Legos that included and even amount of male and female “skidgets” (and imaginary species) and the landscapes in which the reserve would exist. Our goal was to keep the species alive for two years within the reserve. Each month our skidgets were berated by a variety of threats from poachers to brutal weather events.
Through this activity I learned how difficult it can be to maintain a species. I can’t imagine how difficult it is to operate in a scenario like this within the confides of the real world. Maintaining a species in perpetuity must be an extremely frustrating and difficult endeavor.