Stage 2: Determining Acceptable Evidence

Unit essential question: How can scientific models of ecosystems enable us to make well-informed environmental policy decisions?

Unit Culminating Assessment: 9th Grade Environmental Summit

Overview:

You will create a group folio and information booth to be offered at a 9th grade environmental summit, in which government, business, non-profit, and citizen interest groups will be presented an environmental impact assessment by your research team on one of the following topics:

• Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
• Removing logging restrictions on old-growth forests in the American northwest
• Allowing strip-mining of gold in South America (which country does this impact most? I forget.)

Affects many countries throughout Latin America "from Mexico to Peru to Argentina". Much social protest has been incited in Peru in particular.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/trade/2005/0628samines.htm

• Slash and burn agriculture in the Amazon river basin.
• Dredging/removal of toxic PCBs from the Hudson River bottom.
  
• The harvest of tropical hardwoods in South East Asia.
• The global trade in exotic pet and plant species.
  

Groups will be allowed to choose from among different topics, however no two groups will have the same topic.

Detailed description of assessment task:

Your research folio should contain the following sections:

Problem question:

Key ecological concepts:

Review of the literature on this problem:

• Take stock: Provide an inventory of the biodiversity of the region. How many different species are there? For at least 15 organisms give a sense of the population sizes, habitats, and feeding relationships of these organisms.
• Ecosystem models: Develop sample food chain(s), food web(s), nutrient cycle diagrams, and/or population graphs for the ecosystem you are studying.
• Inferences and conclusions based on the model: How is the human impact you are studying affecting the ecosystem in question?
  

Have each member of your team write a persuasive letter to an appropriate government or business entity:

Argue in defense of preserving your chosen ecosystem or a componant of your chosen ecosystem that you have found to be endangered or under stress. Use facts, reasoning and argument to effect change, enact legislation or otherwise support your viewpoint or efforts to preserve the ecosystem.

Scaffolds, Activities, and Checkpoint Assessments:

A great sequence of activities and group worksheets around population biology is to be found at http://naturalsciences.sdsu.edu/classes/lab2.7/lab2.7.html#anchor1076844...

Exercise 1: A Lily Pad Puzzle

Exercise 2: Growth of the Lily Pad Population

Exercise 3: Exponential Growth of Populations

Exercise 4: Carrying Capacity of the Ecosystem

Exercise 5: How Do Populations Affect Each Other?

Exercise 6: The Delicate Balance of Ecosystems Simulation

A decent biodiversity simulation exercise with follow up questions can be found at http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/ATG/data/released/0534-KathyParis/