Diverse communities of arthropods and microbes provide humans with essential ecosystem goods and services. Arthropods are the most diverse and abundant macroscopic animals on the planet, and many remain to be discovered. Much less is known about microbial diversity, despite their importance as free-living species and as symbionts. We created…

Compost bins are beginning to make their way into home gardens and classrooms, allowing students to actively participate in greening their environment. However, do they really understand the process of composting? According to the "National Science Education Standards" (National Research Council [NRC] 1996, 20), "Learning science is something…

Many students do not recognize that individual organisms within populations vary, and this may make it difficult for them to recognize the essential role variation plays in natural selection. Also, many students have weak scientific reasoning skills, and this makes it difficult for them to recognize misconceptions they might have. This paper…

Using an interactive map-based PDF, students learn key concepts related to biodiversity while developing data-analysis and critical-thinking skills. The Bird Island lesson provides students with experience in translating geospatial data into bar graphs, then interpreting these graphs to compare biodiversity across ecoregions on a fictional island.…

Biodiversity has economic value to humans and many suggest that of all groups who should be most interested in the preservation of biodiversity, it should be industries leading the way, as biodiversity has provided, and will continue to provide, many raw materials used by industries around the world. This is especially the case for the…

Plants and insects share a long evolutionary history characterized by relationships that affect individual, population, and community dynamics. Plant-herbivore interactions are a prominent feature of this evolutionary history; it is by plant-herbivore interactions that energy is transferred from primary producers to the rest of the food web. Not…

In this article, we describe an inexpensive, two-session undergraduate laboratory activity that introduces important molecular biology methods in the context of biodiversity. In the first session, students bring tentatively identified flies (order Diptera, true flies) to the laboratory, extract DNA, and amplify a region of the mitochondrial gene…

High diversity of microorganisms in the soil matrix has been the focus of extensive research in the fields of soil biology and microbial ecology, and is a key concept that students in the environmental or biological sciences should understand. Two activities to demonstrate diversity and highlight the challenges faced in studying soil microbial…

An important aspect of teaching biology is to expose students to the concept of biodiversity. For this purpose, bacteria are excellent examples. The advanced placement (AP) biology class at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, Georgia, learned how to explore bacterial biodiversity using molecular fingerprinting. They collected marine water samples,…

Biobottles are miniature ecosystems made from 2-liter plastic soda bottles. They allow students to explore how organisms in an ecosystem are connected to each other, examine how biotic and abiotic factors influence plant and animal growth and development, and discover how important biodiversity is to an ecosystem. This activity was inspired by an…

In an attempt to generate student enthusiasm on the subject of genetics, the author developed a Punnett square activity centered on the genetics of corn snakes to teach students about Mendelism and genetic diversity. As they began the activity, however, some unexpected twists occurred that allowed for investigation into corn snake anatomy and…

To date, little of the ecological research on biological diversity and ecosystem functioning has been carried out in agricultural systems, despite the fact that agriculture is a major contributor to loss of native habitats and species. However, agricultural research has demonstrated that polycultures of multiple crop species can have higher total…

Examining living organisms in one's own backyard is a key first step toward appreciating the scope and importance of biological diversity throughout the world. The goals of this lab are to involve students in exploring the biodiversity around them, appreciating its scope, and asking questions of new organisms that they may never have noticed…