Schoolyard Biodiversity Investigation Educator Guide

The Schoolyard Biodiversity Investigation provides students with the opportunity to learn about biodiversity in a tangible and available environment – their own schoolyard. Whether the campus is a sea of cement and grass or contains a diverse garden or forest, the opportunity for students to investigate first-hand will deepen their understanding of biodiversity, ways to measure it, and the impact people have on it. After looking at their schoolyards, students can then apply their newly-gained knowledge to understand biodiversity and its deeper issues in their local habitats, as well as in far-reaching places. The Schoolyard Biodiversity Guide builds upon student’s field investigation skills, including formulating a hypothesis, designing and implementing an investigation, analyzing data and developing conclusions. For more information, please see the Pacific Education Institute’s Field Investigations: Using Outdoor Environments to Foster Student Learning of Scientific Processes. A downloadable pdf is available at: http://www.pacificeducationinstitute.org/resources/research/.

Standards & Objectives

Essential and guiding questions: 

If we collected vegetation or animal data at a different time of the year, would we get the same Diversity Index calculations? Why or why not?
An area with lots of weeds might score a high Diversity Index. Does a high Diversity Index always mean a habitat is healthy? Why or why not?

  • What are some limitations or problems with random sampling to calculate diversity? (random samples don’t cover all areas; students may not have collected data from enough sample areas; some people have more experience indentifying differences in plants and animals, etc.) 
  • What does biological diversity mean?
  • What is a monoculture?
  • Why didn’t all the different trees get the disease? (hint - genetics)
  • In which forest would you need to use more chemicals to control disease: the Douglas fir forest or the more varied forest? Why?
  • Which forest would have more diversity of wildlife? Why?
  • If you cut down a forest that has a variety of trees and replanted with one type of tree:
  • What will happen to much of the wildlife that was adapted to that prior forest? (Hint: they can always just move elsewhere. If other habitats are good, they will probably be near carrying capacity already. In other words, the surrounding areas may already have good-sized populations growing in them.)
  • Will this happen to all the wildlife? Explain.
  • Growing one plant, as is the case of growing only Douglas-fir, is called monoculture. Besides in neighborhoods, where else might we find monocultures?

Unit Variations

Blooms taxonomy level: 
Analyzing

Helpful Hints

Materials:

  • Pencils
  • Colored Pencils
  • Campus Maps
  • Plain paper for student-created maps
  • Large butcher paper and copy of school map for large, cut-up map
  • Schoolyard Biodiversity Data Sheets (1 set for investigation, extra copies for practice, as needed)
  • Vegetation Survey Data Sheet
  • Wildlife Survey Data Sheet
  • Alien Planet Habitat and Key (1 set per pair of students)
  • Clipboards
  • Tape measures
  • Stopwatches/timers
  • Thermometers
  • Pre-measured rope or tape measure
  • “Flagged sticks” (sticks or pencils with flagging tape tied on top) – 4 per plot
  • Clipboard
  • Student Instructions for Vegetation Survey (this paper)
  • Schoolyard Biodiversity Investigation – Vegetation Survey – Data collection sheet
  • Invasive Plant Identification Cards

References

Contributors: