EcoDragons: A Game for Environmental Education and Public Outreach

SIMPLE SUMMARY: We face serious ecological and societal issues that require a rethinking of our approaches to involving the public in problem-solving and decision-making. Researchers need help from community scientists to gather data and generate fruitful discussions to tackle planetary problems. However, the establishment and maintenance of strong links between scientists and society require innovative ways of communication outside conventional educational institutions. Here, we propose a game that teaches the players the basics of ecological thinking when approaching environmental issues and biodiversity conservation. The game is called EcoDragons and it uses dragonflies as the main biological entity to colonize, establish and maintain biodiversity in an empty landscape that regularly faces climatic and anthropogenic disturbances. While the current EcoDragons was based on European dragonflies, the concept is highly adaptable to dragonflies of other regions (changing the species names), or even to other taxonomic groups. Besides the various pedagogical benefits, the game has the potential to foster public engagement in biodiversity conservation and community science. ABSTRACT: Environmental education is crucial to tackling the pressing ecological and societal issues on our planet. Although there are various ways to approach environmental education and raise public awareness, games are potentially an effective vehicle of knowledge and engagement because they vulgarize the scientific information in a universal ‘language’ and bring people together. Here, we designed a game, EcoDragons, that integrates principles of ecology, biological conservation, life history, and taxonomy. The protagonists of the game are dragonflies and damselflies. The aim of the game is to colonize habitats with different species and use ecological processes (e.g., predation, competition, and mutualism) and conservation measures (e.g., restoration and reintroduction) to face random environmental disturbances (e.g., climate warming, drought, pollution, and biological invasion). The version of the game presented in this paper was based on European species. The game includes 50 species (25 dragonflies and 25 damselflies). The winner of the game is the one who occupies more habitats, establishes and maintains the largest number of species, and solves more anthropogenic disturbances. EcoDragons has a global outreach potential to educate the public about ecology, conservation, and organismic life history, and will probably engage people in environmental advocacy.