BIO 220 CLC endangered species presentation: a guide

Read the note at the end before anything else, because it is the only part of this assignment that affects your individual mark. Each student is to include their name in the notes section of the slides they worked on. In a collaborative assignment, that line is the mechanism by which contribution is assessed, and a slide with nobody's name on it is a slide nobody gets credit for. Agree the split at the start, write the names in as you build rather than at the end, and check the notes pane on every slide before submitting. Then divide the work by requirement rather than by slide count, so that each person owns a section they can research properly instead of everybody producing two slides about whatever was left. Requirement-sized ownership also makes the deck coherent, because the person who read the assessment is the person who writes the slides that depend on it.

The species choice shapes everything and there is a real tension in it worth naming inside the presentation. Requirement four asks for an image usable in a marketing campaign, and marketing works far better with large, visually appealing animals than with the insects, plants, fish and fungi that make up most of the threatened list. That bias is documented, it affects which species actually receive conservation funding, and it is one reason the threatened list is dominated by organisms most people have never heard of. You can either choose a charismatic species and note the bias, or choose an unglamorous one and treat the marketing slide as the harder design problem it then becomes. Either is defensible; noticing the tension is what separates a thoughtful presentation from a competent one, and one sentence on the marketing slide is enough to make the point without derailing the campaign it sits on.

Requirement one asks for the causes of decline with statistics where available, and statistics is the operative word. The IUCN Red List assessment for your species is where those live: population estimates, trend, generation length, the extent of occurrence and, crucially, a coded list of the specific threats. Use it as your primary source rather than a general wildlife page, because it gives you numbers with dates attached and threats named individually rather than as habitat loss in general. If the population figure is uncertain or the trend is inferred rather than measured, say so on the slide, since an honest uncertainty reads better than a confident number nobody can source. Assessments are also dated, and a population estimate from a decade ago should be presented as what it is rather than as the current figure.

Requirements two and three overlap and should be planned together. Human activities affecting the species will usually be the same items as the causes of decline seen from another angle, so avoid repeating slide one. Requirement three then carries a clause most groups miss entirely: as well as current conservation efforts, you must include information on how conservationists are taking the entire ecosystem into account rather than only the species. That clause is asking about habitat protection, prey and host species, connectivity between populations, and management of the wider system, and it exists because single-species conservation frequently fails when the surrounding system is not maintained. Give it its own slide rather than a bullet, and if your species has a recovery plan, say what proportion of the plan's actions are about the animal itself and what proportion are about its habitat, since the answer is usually more surprising than groups expect.

The marketing slide is a design task and it should be treated as one. A campaign image needs one subject, one message and enough visual clarity to work at small size, and the message should follow from your evidence rather than being a general appeal. If the main threat is habitat conversion, the image should say something about habitat, not about the animal's face. Include a caption or headline, and state in the notes why this image and this message were chosen, since that reasoning is the part a marker can assess. Check the licensing on any image you use and credit it, which is also good practice for the reference requirement and takes about a minute. An uncredited image on a slide deck that is otherwise carefully sourced is an odd thing for a marker to find.

On mechanics, the requirements here are unusually specific and all of them are checkable in a minute: fifteen slides, a minimum of four references on the last slide, and GCU documentation guidelines for the in-text citations and reference list even though GCU style is not required for the body. Fifteen slides across five requirements leaves roughly three per requirement, which is enough for a claim, its evidence and a visual, so keep text on the slides short and put the explanation in the notes. Finally, remember that solid academic writing is expected even where the format is not prescribed, which in a slide deck mostly means writing the notes properly rather than leaving them empty. The notes are doing double duty here anyway, since they also carry the contribution names, so they are the last thing to check before anyone submits.