Lichen Niches and Distributions Lab Activity
Author(s): Jessica Coyle
Saint Mary's College of California
1095 total view(s), 248 download(s)
Summary:
This is a 2-part lab activity based on the EREN-NEON Flexible Learning Project: Lichens in Diverse Landscapes. Students conduct field surveys of lichen abundance near their homes and explore large-scale geospatial data on lichens and the environment.
Contents:
Description
This lab activity implements Modules 1 and 2 of the EREN-NEON Flexible Learning Project: Lichens in Diversity Landscapes. Please see the project webpage for links to their materials: http://erenweb.org/eren-neon-flexible-learning-projects/lichens-in-diverse-landscapes/
This lab activity adaptation includes teaching notes and all necessary instructional materials for students. It includes three data sets based on publicly-available data that have been prepared for student use, along with instructions and R scripts for downloading preparing these data.
Learning Objectives:
- Explain how a species’ niche affects its distribution.
- Gain experience in species identification, morpho-species classification, and how to make abiotic and biotic measurements in field settings.
- Explore how bioindicator organisms can be used to assess land-use change, air pollution, and other environmental impacts.
- Explore how to use multi-site collaborative data to conduct regional and continental scale analyses to address ecological and macroecological questions.
- Conduct an observational study to distinguish among multiple hypotheses.
- Display relationships among categorical or continuous variables using figures that are appropriate for the data types.
- Evaluate whether a relationship exists between two variables using a statistical analysis that is appropriate for the data types.
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
- Coyle, J. (2021). Lichen Niches and Distributions Lab Activity. EREN-NEON Flexible Learning Projects FMN Spring 2021, QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/SBG4-RM36