Evaluate conservation strategies -- legal protection, protected areas, restoration ecology, and wildlife corridors -- using documented recovery case studies.
Several conservation tools work together: protected areas (national parks, wildlife refuges, marine protected areas) set aside land or water from development; species-level legal protection, such as the US Endangered Species Act of 1973, prohibits harming a listed species and requires a recovery plan; restoration ecology actively rebuilds degraded habitat (replanting native wetland vegetation, for example); and wildlife corridors reconnect fragmented habitat, directly addressing last week's fragmentation problem by letting animals and genes move between isolated patches again.
The bald eagle recovery from Week 1 is a genuine, well-documented success: from an estimated 417 nesting pairs in the lower 48 states in 1963, the population had grown to more than 71,000 nesting pairs by the time it was reassessed roughly six decades later, driven by a combination of the 1972 DDT ban and Endangered Species Act protection. A second striking case is the 1995 reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, which triggered a documented trophic cascade: wolves reduced elk numbers and changed elk grazing behavior, which allowed streamside willow and aspen trees to recover, which in turn benefited beavers and songbirds -- a single conservation action rippling through an entire food web, connecting directly back to Week 5.
Mastery looks like: They can match a conservation scenario to the most appropriate strategy, correctly compute a rough population-recovery multiple, and explain a real trophic cascade using food-web vocabulary.
Common stumbles: Assuming one single conservation action alone caused a full recovery when several factors usually combine; describing a cascade as only affecting the immediately connected species rather than rippling further through the web.