Estimating the population size of animals is an important task for wildlife biologists, who can use the data to assess the health of a population. It requires diligent observation skills coupled with the ability to use empirical models that effectively determine the number of animals based on field surveys. The most common method for estimating the population size of animals is mark and recapture....
As invasive plant species spread across landscapes, costs of their economic and environmental impacts have sparked interest in regulating their sale and transport. Laws now prohibit the sale and movement of some species. State and local governments are drafting regulations that will affect horticulture, plant nurseries, and options for landscape design. Awareness of invasive plant species is...
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...
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.