This podcast explains how airport expansion causes biodiversity loss, especially among birds.
Students will learn how airports increase noise pollution, light pollution, and habitat loss, making it difficult for animals to survive.
Teaching Tips
Positives
The podcast features an interview with scientists and activist Dr. Jennifer Jones, who explains how an expansion of the Liverpool Airport will damage the surrounding wildlife.
Students will learn about several environmental problems that airports cause, such as dangerous runoff caused by deicing chemicals and bird strikes.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with the effects of habitat loss on biodiversity.
The podcast can be downloaded.
Differentiation
Students could research local airports to find out what kinds of wildlife live in the vicinity. Students could learn about how the airport affects wildlife in the area.
Economics classes could discuss how people are often interested in expanding airports because it means more jobs for the community. Students could discuss environmentally sustainable alternatives to airport jobs.
The podcast raises awareness of how aviation growth affects wildlife, plants, biodiversity, ecological habitats, and climate change. Nocturnal animals, birds, and wildlife are negatively impacted by artificial illumination at the airport. This is a great resource that should be taught in the classroom.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
HS-ESS3-3 Create a computational simulation to illustrate the relationships among management of natural resources, the sustainability of human populations, and biodiversity.
LS2: Ecosystems: Interactions, Energy, and Dynamics
MS-LS2-1 Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.
MS-LS2-4 Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.
MS-LS2-5 Evaluate competing design solutions for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services.
HS-LS2-6 Evaluate the claims, evidence, and reasoning that the complex interactions in ecosystems maintain relatively consistent numbers and types of organisms in stable conditions, but changing conditions may result in a new ecosystem.
