About
My Qube's Lesson dives into a serious environmental problem: Urbanization. Specifically, looking at how urbanization affects the leaf litter decomposition of aquatic ecosystems. This is done through the change in macroinvertebrate assemblages in streams, killing many of the necessary insects that break down the leaf litter. This process of converting CPOM to FPOM is instrumental in transforming organic material into nutrients for other organisms to live off of. As urbanization continues to effect the decomposition of leaves, the problem only worsens. The urban runoff from the impervious surface areas delivers loads of excess nutrients, heavy metals, and other pollutants into the nearby streams killing many of the sensitive taxa that live there, and it leaves room for some nuisance species, such as midges, to take hold and become a pest problem to nearby residents. In this lesson, the student will recreate a portion of an analysis done from a previous study to make inferences on how urbanization effects leaf litter decomposition. Students will make use of linear regression analyses to create their own data table that will then be imported back into R to do a secondary analysis using a linear regression.