A Flexible Framework for Community Diversity Lab Exercises

 

Hans D. Lemke & Leo Shapiro

Tested Studies in Laboratory Teaching, 2018, Volume 39

Abstract

The goals of this exercise are to get students outside, actively engaged with ecological principles, and to appreciate the diversity of the community around them. However, we want to be able to use the same basic lab in different seasons, or even indoors if necessary. We created a framework for comparing community diversities that can be applied to various settings as the need arises. This activity uses Species Richness, as well as the Shannon-Wiener and Gini-Simpson Indices, to teach students not only how to calculate various measures of diversity, but also how to convert them to a more useful value: the effective number of species. This background material provides a flexible framework that can easily be modified to compare systems which are available and relevant for your class. In this workshop, participants used this activity to sort fossils, collect data and compare the biodiversity of Maryland Paleocene and Miocene fish faunas.

Keywords:  diversity index, species richness, community diversity, diversity indices, Shannon-Weiner index, Gini-Simpson index

University of Wisconsin, Madison (2017)