“The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.”
Lady Bird Johnson
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Backyard Species Diversity
Biodiversity is the variety of life in the particular habitat or ecosystem. For this week’s lab we examined the species diversity of plants in our backyards at home. We also compared the plant species diversity of both of our backyards. The Shannon-Wiener Index was then used to determine the more diverse ecosystem. The Shannon-Wiener Index…
Cat Tracker
This week’s lab, Cat Tracker, used animal tracking data from http://www.movebank.org. The data is retrieved from GPS devices that are attached to cats. The GPS tracker records all the places the cat visits, and the data is then uploaded onto the data bank. After uploading onto the data bank, it can be opened in Google Earth and used…
Urban Ecology
For this week’s lab, we analyzed ant biodiversity data from urban habitats. Ants were sampled around the UTC campus using six different food baits: cookies, sugar, salt, amino acids, oil, and water. Temperature and the amount of pavement, known as impervious surface, were used as a measure of urbanization to test the effect of urban…
The Eco 411 