Environmental Science Lab: An Investigation of Species Diversity

This lab is designed to introduce students to some of the key concepts which are important to understanding how biodiversity is measured, and to give students a chance to practice scientific methods. Teacher Amelia and Andy taught students how to use quadrats to measure biodiversity of an ecosystem. Ecology concepts such as species diversity, species evenness and species richness were taught before the field investigation.

There were five groups of students testing two hypotheses at three different locations in the school garden and each group sampled two areas, of which one played as the control group and the other one as the experimental group. The two hypotheses were: 1) For areas in a field, species diversity (species evenness & species richness) will be lower in the areas under the tree canopies than other areas. 2) For areas covered by a tree canopy, species diversity (species evenness & species richness) will be lower in the north side than the south side.

By the end of the lab, students calculated hand-in data in Microsoft Excel. Each group used their results to compare biodiversity of different areas as well as to test the initial hypothesis.