With thirty or so different crop areas, the diversity of plant live varies widely. Discuss Earthwatch Study with students to communicate the idea of longitudinal studies, and the importance of establishing baselines for research. Using the close-up adapter with the digital camera, then projecting the slides from my computer to a large screen with LCD, students will watch slide shows of specific plant and animal species so that they may do species identification in the field. Student work slates will be laminated for repeat use. Students do independent work while I take one team at a time to lay down a quadrant as I model procedures and placement of quadrant and method of data collection.
Students go out in the field and collect data in their teams.
Teams collect data, log data in journals, and input into the computer database. Students each get a copy of database. We begin analyzing data by creating graphs to represent species diversity and another for quantity of species by quadrant. Discuss the data gathered. Students group into new teams in order to debate next steps, then report back to the class.