For the past 15 years, pine forests across the United States have experienced devastating mountain and southern pine beetle outbreaks (Rosner 2015). These outbreaks are not uncommon but have become increasingly severe. Due to the effects of global warming, pine beetles have been able to survive warmer winters in their native habitats, producing greater numbers of offspring (Strain 2012). Warming temperatures have also allowed pine beetles to migrate farther north into territories where they have never been seen on both the east and west coasts (Blake 2018; Rosner 2015; Schlossberg 2016). Additionally, rising temperatures accompanied by droughts are stressing trees, making it harder for the trees to defend themselves and easier for the beetles to take over (Rosner 2015). As pine beetles have entered new regions of the United States, foresters have not been prepared to tackle the problem and lack the resources to protect their forests (Schlossberg 2016). Over the course of four weeks, in a 50-minute class period, high school biology students engaged in understanding this phenomenon through various lessons aligned to the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States 2013). Throughout the ecology unit, students were able to build a vast collection of knowledge to better understand the underlying mechanisms that drive pine beetle attacks and then apply this knowledge to an ecological engineering task. This unit is based on the same phenomenon of Xiang and Mitchell (2019), who took middle school students on a field trip to ask experts questions about bark beetle outbreaks and modeled the phenomenon through a computer simulation. In this article, the unit the authors describe takes a different approach, providing teachers with an example of how students are able to develop models in science to drive and support their understanding of engineering.