| West Virginia Master Naturalist Class Description
| Title: |
NATURE IN WINTER |
| Objectives: |
Explore the ways plants and animals adapt to the special conditions caused by prolonged winter cold.
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| Class type: |
Elective |
| Time: |
1-3 hours |
| Optimal season: |
Winter |
| Materials: |
No special materials needed. |
| Expected outcomes: |
The student will gain a basic understanding of
- what causes the winter season and how its intensity varies with latitude and elevation.
- the main problems that winter cold presents to plants and animals.
- a variety of strategies used by organisms to overcome these problems, including hibernation, migration, and storage of food (animals)
and dropping of leaves or overwintering as seed or underground (plants).
- the advantages to some plant species of decreased competition for light in
winter and early spring, including forest-floor evergreen species,
spring ephemeral herbs, winter annuals.
- ideas for wintertime nature study.
|
West Virginia Master Naturalist Class Outline
| Title: |
NATURE IN WINTER |
| Time: |
1-3 hours |
- Winter, season of cold and short days
- What causes winter (tilted earth means diminished sunlight)
- Winter, elevation, and latitude
- Winter and erosion
- Problems winter presents for living things
- Desiccation (ice is not available to plants and animals)
- Freezing (ice crystals in cells cause fatal physical damage)
- Diminished food supply
- Diminished oxygen in ponds (ice cuts off air, snow cover prevents
oxygenating photosynthesis in aquatic plants)
- Adaptations of plants to winter
- Deciduous trees (both leaves and sap fall)
- Increased light on deciduous forest floor (evergreen herbs and spring ephemerals)
- Resisting drying (e.g., curling of Rhododendron leaves)
- Overwintering as seeds, underground parts, winter annuals, woody stems)
- Adaptations of animals to winter
- Hibernation and less profound states of torpor
- Hoarding food
- Migration (sometimes combined with hibernation, e.g. bats and monarch
butterflies)
- Insulated nests, thicker fur, huddling together
- Change of diet
- Change of color in a white and brown world (e.g., snowshoe hare)
- Mixed foraging flocks of birds
- The naturalist in winter things to observe and things to do (e.g., bird nests,
animal tracks and signs, woody plants, terrestrial invertebrates,
etc.)
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