Natural Heritage: A Teaching Game For Biodiversity Conservation

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. The 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. https://doi.org/10.32942/X20078 Agricultural and Resource Economics, Biodiversity, Environmental Studies, Higher Education biodiversity conservation, landscape ecology, land use, serious game, computer game, social-ecological model Published: 2025-11-04 06:48 Last Updated: 2025-11-04 06:48 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: Natural 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). Language: English