Post-Observation Reflection, FRST 495, University of British Columbia, 1/14/2021

For my first teaching observation of CATL I joined my program mentor Dr. Nolan Bett’s Biological Diversity and Forest Management course. This was one of the few lessons he will teach in the course, as it mostly draws on guest lectures (including one from me later in the semester!). The topic was conservation units, and the tricky task of determining how to protect species and the diversity within them. Nolan is an alumnus of the Pacific salmon ecology and conservation lab that I’m a member of, and he based the lesson around conservation of Chinook salmon.

He started with a poll question asking students how we define species, and then reviewed some of the concepts used to do so. Next, he discussed some of the subjectivity in definitions used by the Species at Risk Act (SARA) in Canada and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in the United States. Next he related these real-world management issues to the theory of evolution by making the point that biodiversity arises through evolution, so one approach and/or way to conceptualize the topic is conserving evolutionary legacies.

The bulk of the lesson was spent examining how this may apply in practice with Chinook salmon conservation and management as a model. There are many different populations of Chinook salmon throughout their range and mixing between populations is low because individuals home to their natal stream to spawn, with a low straying rate (3-5%). Thus, populations are often uniquely adapted to their natal watershed and may also have different life history patterns. One interesting life history quirk of Chinook is that some fish return in the spring (spring-run) and spend the summer in freshwater before spawning in the fall, while others spend that time in the ocean before returning to spawn in the fall (fall-run). Nolan detailed the evolutionary origin of the spring-run trait, its distribution, the importance of it for harvest and diversity, and the conservation and management challenges to it (especially threats from dams). Following this information, Nolan initiated a group discussion with two questions. The first was specific to spring-run Chinook salmon and whether they constituted distinct conservation units as well as if they should be protected under SARA/ESA. The second was how to prioritize our conservation efforts toward spring-run populations and whether other life history or ecological traits should be considered. Then to finish the lesson Nolan made the point that how we define conservation units for salmon is applicable to diversity elsewhere and used a warbler example to illustrate this.

I noticed that the overall structure of the lesson was to pose a disciplinary issue to pique students’ interest, detail a specific case study that gives an idea of how complex an issue can be and how it is tackled in the real world, and then ask students how what they have learned might be applied to other topics or taxa in the discipline. I think each of these stages were effective in engaging the students and encouraging them to consider the impact of minute things (mutation of a single gene for spring-run Chinook) and comparably huge things (blanket policy for endangered species or conservation units).

I think the techniques Nolan used also helped students learn ways of seeing and acting as practitioners in the discipline. One aspect of this was showing how scientists uncovered the sources of evolutionary diversity causing migration timing in Chinook and habitat use in warblers. Another aspect was the discussion of how conservation efforts should be prioritized. The information provided, scenarios offered, and discussion based on priorities and feasibility is similar to how stakeholders and managers work to determine status and conservation plans.

I enjoyed observing this lesson and think it was especially helpful to see how it was structured, as well as the activities that Nolan used to get students engaged. I’m comfortable with detailing studies about a relatively specific topic and posing discussion questions that prompt students to consider how this information could be best used to design conservation and management strategies. However, I think what I gained the most from and will “steal” is the introduction of a difficult overarching topical question at the beginning, and the extrapolation/comparison to different systems at the end.