Grasping the mathematics underlying the species-area relationship in island biogeography can be difficult for students if they experience it passively. This exercise allows students to take an authentic data set of bird species richness from different islands in the Solomon Islands Archipelago and fit a species-area relationship (S=cAz). Students explore a biological concept in a hands-on...
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.
At the end of this activity, students will demonstrate their ability to understand basic principles of disease transmission, convey real epidemiological data as visual stories, and develop a plan to handle a “real” outbreak. Instructors may evaluate students’ knowledge and comprehension of the basic principles of disease transmission by analyzing how students’ initial and final hypotheses changed...
This class was designed for an introductory ecology course. Students are introduced to Microsoft Excel PivotTables by amending an existing PivotTable, then create their own PivotTables to explore the main data sets. These data sets provide information on the breeding success of carrion crows parasitized by great spotted cuckoos in Spain. Students summarise the large data sets, produce bar charts,...
The rise of biodiversity-related citizen science projects gives us the opportunity to inspire all students to become citizen scientists, no matter what their professional path. Here, I share an in-class exercise that introduces undergraduates to biodiversity and citizen science using the open-source platform iNaturalist. I developed the exercise as part of a semester-long module on bumblebee...
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