{"paper_id":"1ad41e82-611c-48ec-9d17-dfa25103dff2","body_text":"This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.\nYou must log in to post a comment.\nThere are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.\nThis is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.\nAdd a Comment\nYou must log in to post a comment.\nComments\nThere are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.\nThe potential for computer games to serve as effective learning and teaching tools is now widely acknowledged. Here, we present ‘Natural Heritage’, an educational turn-based strategy game about biodiversity conservation. In it, the player takes on the role of an elected policy maker who has to balance ecological and economic targets while managing regional land use. The game aims to teach key principles of ecology by integrating them into its game mechanics, such as habitat heterogeneity or the species-area relationship. It also challenges players to think about the economic and political aspects of conservation. The game is open source and available online, and is intended to be used to accompany instruction in an upper secondary or undergraduate class. In this paper, we explain the goal, design, and mechanics of the game, and describe the underlying mathematical model that drives the social-ecological simulation based on the player's input.\nhttps://doi.org/10.32942/X20078\nAgricultural and Resource Economics, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Higher Education\nbiodiversity conservation, landscape ecology, land use, serious game, computer game, social-ecological model\nPublished: 2025-11-04 06:48\nLast Updated: 2025-11-04 06:48\nCC BY Attribution 4.0 International\nConflict of interest statement:\nNone\nData and Code Availability Statement:\nNatural Heritage can be played online at https://jakob-s.itch.io/natural-heritage, and can be downloaded for Microsoft Windows and GNU/Linux from there. The source code is available on Github (https://github.com/CCTB-Ecomods/Natural-Heritage).\nLanguage:\nEnglish","source_license":"CC-BY-4.0","license_restricted":false}