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...

Publisher: EcoEd Digital Library

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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...

Publisher: EcoEd Digital Library

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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.

Publisher: EcoEd Digital Library

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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...

Publisher: EcoEd Digital Library

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