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Climate-Induced Shifts in California Butterflies

Author(s): Jessica Coyle

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Summary:
A module in which students generate and test hypotheses about butterfly species’ response to climate change in the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California using publicly available data.

Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 1.0 - published on 17 Jul 2020 doi:10.25334/5QDG-2930 - cite this Last public release: 2.0

Description

In this activity students generate and test hypotheses about butterfly species’ response to climate change in the Central Valley and Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California using publicly available data. This activity can be used in both in-person or remote online instruction. It is designed to be introduced by an instructor, with students subsequently working independently through a worksheet-based analysis. The activity is designed for college-level students who are familiar with the concept of scatterplots and simple linear regression as a tool to test correlation, but it does not assume any prior experience with analysis of data in spreadsheets.

Students will learn to:

  • Predict ways that animals may respond to climate change in mountainous regions.
  • Formulate and evaluate a multi-step hypothesis using linear regression.
  • Recognize publicly available data on species distributions and climate.
  • Filter and combine data using a spreadsheet (Spreadsheet version).
  • Interpret the slope in a linear regression (CODAP version).

Two versions of this lesson are provided:

  • Spreadsheet version: includes a student instructions worksheet and spreadsheet-based workbook containing the data that students will analyze.
  • Common Online Data Analysis Platform (CODAP) version: includes a student instructions document and links to CODAP workbooks with the data that students will analyze.

The lesson includes instructions for downloading butterfly distribution and weather station data for other species or regions along with R code that formats these data for students.

Notes

This is the first version of this resource. It was heavily inspired by the teaching module The Effect of Climate Change on Butterfly Phenology (Linton et al. 2018) and by educational activities on Art Shapiro’s Butterfly Site (http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu).

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