Biodiversity Count

• This was the students first introduction to the concept of biodiversity. Many students had no or little background in this environmental studies and only basic science education in high school.
• This was taught to advanced high school students in a international studies program. The course was part of an international environmental studies elective course.
• This exercize worked well in a two hour class block.
• We walked outside of our building for the first biodiversity count. We walked down the road 10 minutes to a park with a remnant forest. It was an unmanaged forest and river area with walking paths.
• This type of activity requires an area with low biodiversity and higher biodiversity.
• We used the activity as the beginning of a discussion of biodiversity loss worldwide.

1. Have students break into groups of 3 to 4 people.
2. Move students outside to an urbanized area, but one with some green space, such as trees or grass. Have students count the number of species that they can find in a five minute block.
3. Reassemble large group. Have student groups tell the group the number of species counted.
4. Move to a naturalized area. (In this class, we moved to a "natural" city park within walking distance from campus).
5. Have students repeat the count.
6. In our class, we found that the students were overwhelmed by the number of species in the natural park.
7. We used this as a teachable moment to discuss how the whole area used to look like the park before development; this type of biodiversity loss is happening worldwide.

The biodiversity section of Action Bioscience includes information about biodiverity and educator's resources (including power point presentations, overheads, and worksheets).

The The Biodiversity Project has introductory information about biodiversity that was set up for the media and a good list of resources.