This photograph shows scientists obtaining sediment core, which is useful in studying changes in forest composition, the frequency of forest fires, and climate change over the past 10,000 years. Pollen charcoal, and chemistry of lake sediments are used for this work.
As simplifications of real system, models can be used by students to improve their understanding of an ecosystem and to make predictions about what will happen after a disturbance or other change to the ecosystem. This activity guides students through the development of quantitative ecological models. Students use a model to explore how ecosystems work and to predict how disturbance can affect...
Ecologists attempt to establish general principles from a vast range of organizational, spatial, and temporal scales (Belovsky et al. 2004). The process of developing generalities in ecology involves two approaches often not addressed in introductory science courses – inductive and deductive. One way of thinking about this is to consider the inductive approach as examining particular cases an...
Use maps, online databases, and peer-reviewed literature to:
(1) learn background information on
WNV (history of emergence in the US; life cycle, hosts, and vectors; different forms of WNV
disease and susceptibility of various human age groups) and
(2) generate and test hypotheses
correlating human, avian, and mosquito WNV infection with avian biodiversity,
presence/abundance of different...
Species diversity generally increases in the tropics but testing theories that explain this phenomenon is challenging. Here we use body size to quantify niches in ecological communities and explore how species diversify towards the equator.
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