Rainforest Explorers

Self-led trail about Rainforest conservation

  • Role: creative lead
  • Stakeholder: Bristol Zoological Society
  • Sectors: charity (conservation and education)
  • Deliverables: Interpretation boards and downloadable worksheets

Rainforest Explorers is a trail about the different habitats found in rainforests and the conservation work happening to protect them.

  • Design
  • Illustration
A pupil is looking at the test print-out of the Understorey layer board, he is pointing at the little explorer figure hidden inside the rainforest illustration Artwork for the Ground layer board that focusses on Western lowland gorillas and gives information about the dark and damp conditions and the importance of decomposers such as invertebrates and fungi Worksheets for the ground layer with a quiz about camera trap images and the understorey layer with a lemur leaf frog identification quiz
Testrun of the interpretation trail (top), artwork for the ground layer trail board (middle) and worksheet examples (bottom)

Rainforests are made up of four distinct layers, each providing food and shelter to certain animal species: the ground, the understorey, the canopy and the emergent layer.

Together with the Education officer I developed four boards, each focussing on one of the four layers, and four worksheets to go with the boards. Every worksheet contains a puzzle relating to a relevant species at the zoo and each solved puzzle provides a hint to crack the secret message.

The challenge of the project was to present and explain the complex ecosystems and trail puzzles in a way that was engaging and easy to understand. We ran a test of the trail with two schoolgroups to review how engaging, easy or hard pupils found the trail. Based on the feedback we made some improvements to the final boards and worksheets by simplifying some of the copy and visually highlighting the purpose of each puzzle better.