The Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies

in collaboration with

The USDA Forest Service at the Northern Research Station

LMSLearn

LMSLearn: Bringing the Forest - and the Future - into the Classroom

Environmental issues are becoming increasingly complex. To address these questions, students must develop the critical thinking and decision making skills necessary to participate in the democratic discussions of their times. LMSLearn is an educational program designed for middle and high school students, using forested landscapes as a context for learning about forest ecology and developing decision-making skills.

LMSLearn is based on the Landscape Management System (LMS), a decision support tool developed by researchers and foresters at Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, University of Washington, with support from the U.S.D.A. Forest Service. LMS is used as a tool by foresters for long-term landscape scale management activities. The program’s interface has been adapted to make it accessible to students and others new to the field of forest management. LMSLearn’s most valuable characteristic is its visual depictions of simulated forests in the present and in their projected growth forms in the future. This feature assists students in resolving the difficult task of conceptualizing and understanding a distant future. The program has been compared to a forested version of the popular computer game SimCity.

To complement the computer-based portion of the program, LMSLearn includes a series of basic lessons that can be conducted in the classroom or out in a forest. Students thus have a reality from which they can construct their understanding of the virtual forest in the computer program. LMSLearn fits neatly with other well-known environmental education programs and meets many national science and technology education standards. State-level standards correlations will soon be available for Arizona, California, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

LMSLearn also coordinates well with many of the popular environmental education curricula, such as Project Learning Tree or Project WILD. The Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry will be offering workshops for educators in the future to assist in the integration of LMSLearn with teachers’ existing curricula.

Click here to download the software.