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Bee Courteous, Bee Safe
Bee Courteous, Bee Safe
You may attract more than butterflies to your garden — other pollinators, such as bees, may also appreciate your efforts.
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Adopt an Ecosystem
2025-11-24
In any area — a pond, meadow, or your backyard — water, soil, air and living things form an ecosystem. Your ecosystem includes the sunshine, air, water, land, food, house and friends you depend on to keep you healthy and happy.
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Aliens Among Us
2025-11-24
Assign this resource sheet to students as homework or as a classroom reading activity. This backgrounder outlines key terms and concepts that are fleshed out later on.
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An Ecosystem Approach
2025-11-24
Your ecosystem includes the land, air, water, sunshine, food, home, schoolmates, friends, and family you need to grow up healthy and happy.
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Aquatic Habitat Projects
2025-11-24
Creating a mini-wetland in your schoolyard is surprisingly simple. It may be your key to attracting a host of wet and wild creatures.
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Arrange for Wildlife
2025-11-24
It's important to arrange your plantings so that they provide maximum benefits for wildlife.
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A Student Leadership Approach to Festival Organization
2025-11-24
A festival or celebration is simply a collection of activities, displays, and presentations with a common theme.
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A Treasure Hunt on the Watery Web
2025-11-24
Try this virtual scavenger hunt. Answer all the questions by searching the Oceans Day partners' Web sites listed in parentheses after each question.
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Bee Courteous, Bee Safe
2025-11-24
You may attract more than butterflies to your garden — other pollinators, such as bees, may also appreciate your efforts.
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Benefits and Values, Threats and Consequences
2025-11-24
It is easy to overlook the services provided by pollinators, living and non-living. Yet, without pollination, many plants could not reproduce.
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Biodiversity Field Study
2025-11-24
One way to conserve our aquatic treasures is to participate in a biodiversity field study along a migratory route.
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Bio what?
2025-11-24
Biodiversity is a simple way of saying biological diversity — but don't worry, we can make it even easier than that!
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Boost Ocean Biodiversity
2025-11-24
We've scarcely begun to understand the diversity hidden in the ocean and the interrelationships among its innumerable parts.
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Build Life-Support Systems
2025-11-24
Every time you improve habitat, you are helping to build critical life-support systems for a host of wild creatures.
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Build Your Team
2025-11-24
Team building is important. More can be accomplished by a group than by individuals, and members feel that they are making a real contribution. Working with a small team, or even with just a buddy, will instill a sense of pride in your project and, even more importantly, in your community.
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Canada's Changing North
2025-11-24
Canada's northern environment, wildlife and people are facing major changes. Global climate change, caused mainly by our urbanized activities in the south, is predicted to have its greatest impact in this region.
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Canada — an Ocean Community
2025-11-24
What is a community? It’s a collection of living things, joined by interrelationships and interdependencies.
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Canada is an Ocean Community
2025-11-24
Every single community in Canada is linked to the sea through the never-ending flow of water in streams, rivers, wetlands, ponds, and lakes.
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Canadian Action Makes Waves for Oceans
2025-11-24
Environmental problems not only cross national boundaries, but also the boundaries between federal and provincial jurisdictions.
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Celebrate Canada's North
2025-11-24
Perhaps you regard the North as a cold, harsh environment. Or maybe you already know that it is a fascinating world, inhabited by spectacularly resilient plants and animals adapted to some of the most extreme conditions on the planet.
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Climate Change, Sea Change
2025-11-24
Today, the world is heating up faster than at any other time in 10,000 years. Global temperatures have risen significantly since the start of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1700s.
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Community Action Makes a World of Difference for Wildlife
2025-11-24
You can think of a natural community as all the plants and animals in a particular habitat that are bound together by food-chains and other interactions.
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Conserve a Flyway
2025-11-24
Countless thousands of winged wanderers need places to rest and refuel as they commute between Canadian breeding grounds and wintering habitats in the United States and Central and South America.
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Conserve Corridors
2025-11-24
As human developments continue to dice, mince, and pulverize natural areas, the need for connectivity between fragmented habitats becomes more vital.
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Conserve the Arctic Marine Ecosystem
2025-11-24
You can help prevent or slow the pace of such long-range impacts by doing the classroom activities and ocean action projects in this section.
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Create Edge Habitat
2025-11-24
Edges are wonderful examples of biodiversity in action. They are areas where one type of habitat meets and blends with another.
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Create Wildlife Habitat
2025-11-24
Trees provide a remarkable selection of food and shelter for countless wildlife species; enhance and beautify the landscape; cut down pollution by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing clean air and water; prevent soil erosion caused by wind and water; buffer noise by absorbing and deflecting sound; and save energy spent on heating and air-conditioning by blocking winter winds and providing summer shade.
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Discover the Ocean
2025-11-24
Healthy oceans offer us a treasure trove of biodiversity that we tend to take for granted.
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Educate Your Community
2025-11-24
So you've decided to create an ecology study centre in your schoolyard. You can use this chance to do some teaching yourselves! Let the community know what you're up to and how important it is that we all practise sustainable development.
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Encourage Community Action
2025-11-24
Here are some ideas on how to encourage the participation of people from outside your classroom.
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Examine Your Ecozone
2025-11-24
This activity will help you assess your ecozone’s general vitality and then prescribe "treatments" to cure ill health.
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Facilitating Personal Experiences in the Outdoors
2025-11-24
Here are some basic guidelines for taking students on a local field trip where they can develop this important personal connection to nature.
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Freshwater – Our Living Link with the Ocean
2025-11-24
Your community is one of thousands sprinkled across a huge mass of mountains, hilltops, flat lands, and wetlands.
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From Me to the Sea Checklist
2025-11-24
Indicate how true the following statements are for you by circling the response that best describes your behaviour.
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Get Out in the Field
2025-11-24
The best way to learn about shorelines — and to understand why we need to conserve them — is to visit one, whether it’s a riverbank, lakeside, sea coast, or another place where land meets water.
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Give Backyard Birds Something to Sing About
2025-11-24
We may take our birds for granted, yet they have a lot to teach us. They are often our first introduction to the ways of the wild.
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Give Biodiversity a Boost
2025-11-24
The health of wild creatures and humans depends on the diversity of these tiny invertebrates, plants, and micro-organisms.
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Great Blue Hope
2025-11-24
Make a nesting structure that will accommodate not only great blue herons but also black-crowned night-herons and double-crested cormorants.
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Healthy Habitat, Healthy World
2025-11-24
If a species is thriving, its habitat is probably healthy too. When a creature or plant starts to disappear, something must be wrong with its habitat.
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Heed Wildlife Warnings
2025-11-24
All sorts of wildlife, from bugs to bears, are killed while crossing roads. Sometimes we can help these animals dodge traffic by building special routes for them.
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Help Habitat Hot Spots
2025-11-24
Help avoid a habitat disaster by getting key lawmakers to take your concerns seriously. But first, do your homework.
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Help Habitats Recover
2025-11-24
The South Okanagan and Lower Similkameen area is out of this world!
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Help Reduce Pollution
2025-11-24
Pollution is everywhere. Some forms occur naturally, such as acid rain falling when volcanoes erupt. That's called ecological pollution, and we really can't do anything about it. However, most pollution that harms people and wildlife is caused by humans!
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Homage to the Ocean
2025-11-24
A whole sea of opportunities to organize ocean-related events awaits you.
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How You Can Make a Difference
2025-11-24
Educating yourself is an excellent first step. Your enthusiasm will encourage others to get involved.
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Implement Your Plan
2025-11-24
You can accomplish an amazing range of projects with a little community teamwork! Here are some more ideas to help you get started.
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Improve Connections in Your Schoolyard Ecosystem
2025-11-24
Canada is a huge country — much too big to be considered one ecosystem.
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International Action Can Make Waves for Oceans
2025-11-24
Ocean pollution, overfishing, habitat destruction, and loss of biodiversity are problems too serious and complicated for any country to tackle on its own.
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In the Buffer Zone
2025-11-24
The strip of moisture-loving trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants along the edge of a lake, river, wetland, or other watery habitat is called the buffer zone.
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In the City
2025-11-24
Here are some suggestions on how to reclaim an urban waterfront for wildlife.
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In the Country
2025-11-24
The following projects will help you protect wetlands and streams on prairies and in other rural areas.
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In the Littoral Zone
2025-11-24
The shoreline web of life and water quality have suffered. But we can repair this damage.
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Keep Canada Ever Green for Wildlife
2025-11-24
Only about one percent of the sun's energy that falls on a plant is converted into plant matter. But amazingly, the entire animal kingdom — including the human race — depends on that one percent.
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Lend Wings to Migratory Birds
2025-11-24
We may have solved the mystery of the vanishing songbirds. But as far as their habitats are concerned, we've barely begun to put the pieces back together.
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Link Up With Other Communities
2025-11-24
Now you have a good idea of what you can do to improve wildlife habitat in your immediate area. Wouldn't it be great if neighbouring communities followed your lead?
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Maintain a Wildlife Haven
2025-11-24
A little maintenance goes a long way. Just by cleaning up an area, removing competing vegetation, and adding water, you're contributing to the greening of Canada — and you're helping wildlife!
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Make a Green Plan for Wildlife
2025-11-24
From caribou to robins to butterflies, a host of creatures will respond to your planting plan if it includes the habitat components they need for survival.
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Make a World of Difference
2025-11-24
In many parts of the world, we’re using resources faster than they can be replenished. To stop this, we must start now to manage the planet’s resources so that they can continue to keep us and future generations alive. But how do we do this?
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Make Way for Wild Migrants
2025-11-24
Sometimes called the lifeblood of the Earth, migration is like a vast circulation system that pumps blood toward the Earth's poles in spring and back toward the equator in fall.
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Make Your Project Happen
2025-11-24
Creating habitat for migrants is simple if you develop your project in stages and if it is driven by student initiative.
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Making Maps for Birds
2025-11-24
There are endless ways to make maps that will help our feathered friends as well as help students learn about them.
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Microhabitat Projects
2025-11-24
With a little planning, physically and mentally challenged students can help bring habitat back to health.
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Migratory Species Need Migratory Spaces
2025-11-24
Everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica, finned, furred, fanged, and feathered travellers are on the go.
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Mind a Micro-Migration
2025-11-24
You too can give safe passage to rambling reptiles and ambulatory amphibians.
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Monitor Marine Migrants
2025-11-24
Students can leam a lot about marine migrants — and how they depend on healthy habitats to survive — by monitoring them both in real space and in cyberspace.
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My Grampa’s Tall Tales
2025-11-24
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National Parks and Wilderness Reserves
2025-11-24
Climate is Changing... Help Wildlife Weather the Storm
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Nurture Wildlife Habitat
2025-11-24
It's time we stopped treating our soil like dirt. This living resource may seem like pretty passive stuff, but there's a lot more to it than meets the eye.
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Ocean Life on the Move
2025-11-24
Life is a highway for billions of creatures that live, breed, eat, and play in the ocean.
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Oceans are Indispensable
2025-11-24
The Earth needs oceans because all the elements on the planet are carefully balanced, including water, air, soil, and living things.
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Oceans… Closer than you think
2025-11-24
You may live thousands of kilometres from the nearest coast, but the health of our oceans matters to all of us. And what each of us does affects their health.
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On the Seashore
2025-11-24
Combining land and sea, fresh and salt water, these transitional environments are in a constant state of change.
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Overfishing, Damage to Coasts, and Ocean Health Indicators
2025-11-24
Our oceans give us 90 million tonnes of fish each year! Unfortunately, we have often not fished carefully to conserve enough fish for the future.
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Plant a Million Trees
2025-11-24
One small but important thing everyone can do for wildlife is plant a tree.
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Plant Native Species
2025-11-24
Plants that occur naturally in an area are called native or indigenous species. It's best to plant native species, because they are used to local soil and weather conditions.
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Preserve Our Aquatic Heritage
2025-11-24
The following activities and projects will enable you to start taking decisive action, such as promoting the establishment of marine conservation areas.
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Prevent Marine Pollution
2025-11-24
Pollution kills countless ocean creatures, impacting hardest on coastal waters, the areas richest in biodiversity and the marine resources we depend on most.
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Protecting Northern Waters
2025-11-24
Northern waters are a valuable part of Canada’s natural and cultural heritage.
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Protecting Special Wild Places in Canada
2025-11-24
Wild areas are essential for maintaining biodiversity at all levels (genetic, species, and ecosystem).
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Put Biodiversity into Action
2025-11-24
Take a stroll around your schoolyard or the area you want to improve for wildlife.
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Put Down Roots
2025-11-24
To help wildlife, we must look after Canada's biodiversity, and one great way of doing that is to protect plants.
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Recycle Resources
2025-11-24
The next time you're about to drop a sheet of paper or a tin can into the wastepaper basket, for example, why not think about dropping it in a recycling bin instead? Recycling things like paper, glass and tin makes an amazing difference for wildlife.
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Ribbons of Life
2025-11-24
The edges of our lakes, streams, rivers, and wetlands — known as riparian zones — as well as ocean coasts, are essential to living things.
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Save Fragile Habitats
2025-11-24
The Prairie Grasslands Region is one of the most endangered habitats in Canada. But grasslands aren't found only in the Prairie provinces; there are also patches of them in Ontario.
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Save Species and Spaces in Crisis
2025-11-24
There are more kinds of ecosystems in Canada than you can imagine, from tall-grass prairies and estuaries to Carolinian forests and alpine meadows.
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Save the Gene Pool
2025-11-24
There are many reasons why we need to conserve the genetic diversity on our planet. Every species has a role in nature, even if we don't know what it is right now.
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Sea Duck, Tree Duck
2025-11-24
Plunging populations in 10 of our 15 sea duck species have raised an alarm among waterfowl biologists.
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Sea Ducks on the Move
2025-11-24
These feisty waterfowl migrate in spring and fall between inland breeding areas and wintering habitats along our coasts.
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Seas of Change
2025-11-24
You must have noticed the signs. Longer, hotter summers. Shorter, milder winters. Birds arriving on their breeding grounds weeks before they once did. So, why not just enjoy the weather? Because what seems like a change for the better is really a cause for grave concern.
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Set an Example
2025-11-24
Guess what? Your schoolyard is an ecosystem, too. It's a great place for play at recess, but it can be much more than that. It's a perfect spot to practise sustainable development. Why not use it to create an ecology study centre for wildlife?
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Shoreline Habitat Report Card
2025-11-24
Use this report card to keep track of signs of good or ill health along a shoreline.
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Stand on Guard for Aquatic Habitats
2025-11-24
We have only just started to give the marine heritage under our care the attention and protection it deserves.
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Stand on Guard for Northern Wildlife
2025-11-24
If you live in the North, you can "stand on guard" for wildlife.
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Support Soggy Spaces
2025-11-24
Help make way for migrants that rely on watery spots by tackling any of the following habitat projects.
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Support the World-Wide Web of Life in Your Schoolyard
2025-11-24
Your life is inseparable from the ecosystem you live in. Every species interacts with the air, water, sun, soil, and living things that sustain it in a huge web of interdependency.
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Sustainability Means Survival
2025-11-24
Sustainability means our ability to survive — to continue living on the Earth — and it depends on our wise use of natural resources.
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Sustainable Development: The Challenge of the Century
2025-11-24
Sustainable development is a blend of two ideas: development and sustainability. Through development, we attempt to satisfy people's needs. These include such basics as food, water, clothing, jobs, health care and so on. Development also goes beyond the basics to provide a good quality of life.
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Sustain Wildlife Habitat
2025-11-24
The key to creating, nurturing, and sustaining wildlife habitat is to make the most of the people and resources in your entire school and community.
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Take Action for Oceans
2025-11-24
It's good to teach our children to act on their beliefs. When they understand the importance of oceans and how human activities threaten them, they can respond by taking part in a variety of ocean-supporting actions.
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The Global Aquatic Ecosystem
2025-11-24
All land is divided into watersheds — that is, areas of land that drain into particular bodies of water.
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The Heat is On
2025-11-24
When we chop down forests, pave over wetlands, and pollute our lakes and seas, we deprive terrestrial and aquatic plants of their power to absorb greenhouse gases and keep the planet's climatic system in balance.
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The Northern Community
2025-11-24
The projects in this section are designed especially — but not exclusively — for residents of northern communities.
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The Ocean Threats Scavenger Hunt
2025-11-24
How many of these ocean threats can you find in your community?
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The Science of Pollination Primer
2025-11-24
Not all plants are seed-producing plants (known as spermatophytes) but most fall into two major groups: the flowering plants and the conifers. Of the more than 230,000 known species of plants worldwide, about 200,000 are flowering plants; another 500 are conifers while others include such plants as ferns and mosses. Most seed-producers owe their great success, in part, to pollination.
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Threats to the Ocean from Your Backyard
2025-11-24
Human activities are threatening the world's oceans.
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Troubled Water, Troubled Times
2025-11-24
Climate change resulting from human activities could be the greatest environmental threat facing life on this planet.
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Turn Grey Zones into Green Zones
2025-11-24
More than likely, there’s a monoculture near you — even in your schoolyard or a nearby park. Think of ways to boost biodiversity there.
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Turn the Tide on Pollution
2025-11-24
For many marine migrants, the deep blue sea is becoming a deadly obstacle course, as solid waste and land-based pollution become unwelcome travelling companions.
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Watery Worlds
2025-11-24
Each part of a wetland ecosystem is needed for the whole system, or organism, to work.
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What Governments Do
2025-11-24
There are a number of ways that governments protect areas in Canada's North.
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What Harms Ocean Life?
2025-11-24
Oceans seem too huge to harm, don't they? But we humans are actually making our oceans sick.
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What is Climate Change?
2025-11-24
Have you noticed that the summers are getting longer and hotter, the winters shorter and milder? Maybe you think that's a change for the better. Think again.
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Where Do You Fit In?
2025-11-24
You have a lot in common with beetles, bears, and brambles. All living things need healthy habitat to survive.
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Why Should You Make Waves for Oceans
2025-11-24
A whopping 80 per cent of ocean pollution comes from human activities on land and poses risks to human health and the environment.
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With Your Community
2025-11-24
The projects in this section require technical know-how and/or entry into water.
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Work for Wet Places
2025-11-24
Wetlands are amazing places. They are some of the most productive areas for wildlife in the world.
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You Live in a Watershed. Get to Know it!
2025-11-24
No matter where you live, work or play, you live in a watershed.
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Your Special Wild Place – Love it or Lose it
2025-11-24
Here are some of the things that can happen to special wild places in our own neighbourhoods.