It's Alive... or is it?

Biodiversity: Can science save an ecosystem from extinction?

Middle School Life Science: Matter and Energy in Organisms and Ecosystems

MS:LS 2-1 Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem.

If you've never looked into the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's (HHMI) BioInteractive site, NOW would be a great time to do so. This free website is such a wealth of information, ranging from data sets to lesson plans to short videos to full-on inquiry-based explorations. Each resource specifically is linked to current scientific research and provides students with tremendous insight into what science really "looks like."

My middle school class immediately dug into the citizen-science aspect of the WildCam Gorongosa activities. There's no better way to study an ecosystem than to immerse oneself in the trail-cam photos as if we were really there (since a field trip to Mozambique was out of the question)! I could see students at any level using the built in tools (as well as this Field Guide) to key out the different species they observed. As with any citizen-science program, the students felt pretty important when they learned that what they were doing would really be utilized by scientists studying the biodiversity of the area.

While we didn't complete the entire BioInteractive WildCam Lab, we did use several of the resources available (found in their entirety here) to look at how populations changed over time due to different habitat disturbances. It was a great way to not only introduce food chains/webs/pyramids, but to look at how these relationships were influenced when resource availability changed.

Link to Slides and Student Guide we used in class