Climate BufferNet

Abstract

Climate BufferNet is an educational, visual simulation designed to engage higher education students in the Midwestern United States with ideas for improving rural landscape planning outcomes. Past and present social and economic forces shaping the midwestern agricultural landscape have fundamentally transformed its natural systems, impacting food security, biodiversity, and community and ecosystem resilience to climate change. However, the lack of specific knowledge concerning these socioecological and economic forces and their feedback loops constitutes an information barrier to stakeholders new to the decision-making frameworks that shape this complex socioagricultural landscape. This article presents a serious socioecological gaming simulation case study as a framework for familiarizing landscape architecture students with the complex interactive characteristics of these systems. The Climate BufferNet study immersed students in an interactive, co-learning visual media environment that confronted them with real-world challenges of balancing economic priorities with the degraded ecological feedback loops now prevalent in this multifunctional landscape. The results of student evaluations from initial playtesting, presented here, revealed that the simulation accurately demonstrates the difficulty in balancing environmental and economic goals. Further, qualitative coding of student responses shows that players were using the simulation to actively experiment with spatial configurations of conservation practices and decipher rules for targeting their actions. The results of these initial pilot tests, documented here, demonstrate both the potential for engaging landscape architects in rural landscape planning and the need for greater attention to the complexities of environmental and economic tensions between biodiversity, climate change, and ecosystem services.