JENGLE

Sensitizing children about the importance of inter-relationships in nature.

We are facing the 6th mass extinction, in addition to other multiple effects of human activities on ecosystems. Ecosystems could change dramatically in the coming decades, which could affect nature as a whole, including us humans and our way of life. In this context, actions must be taken to preserve ecological systems and ourselves within them. In particular, children need to be aware of the current challenges we are facing to become active and thoughtful participants of our society.

Typical conservation approaches have focused on a few iconic species. We are however becoming increasingly aware of the need to consider ecosystems as a whole, with the species that compose them as well as the interactions that link species. Indeed, because species form intricate networks of interdependencies in natural communities, perturbations on one species can propagate through the network and eventually affect entire ecosystems. That is why we can’t protect a single species without taking into account the network of interactions to which it belongs.

On this website, we present an outreach project aiming at sensitizing children to the issues of biodiversity and its response to global changes by insisting on the importance of taking species interactions into account, i.e. looking at ecological systems as networks of interactions.

Our project consists in building a toolbox of supports that can be used in schools to communicate about these questions.