Simpson's Diversity Index Lab at Home

I was planning to do the Simpson's Diversity Index Lab from Lee Ferguson for the first time this year, since that equation had been added to the new CED for AP Biology. You can find the lab here.

In the time that I had to put together materials for my classes before the school building closed, our guidance counselor helped me get bags of beans together for the capture-recapture lab, and stamp and seal tests to send home while I also printed reading guides and labs for the unit. One thing I forgot to do was to prep bags for the Simpson's Diversity Index lab.

As I was thinking about what I could do since they didn't have any bags of "ecosystems," I thought of my card making hobby and rubber stamp collection. I used this document to guide the numbers of organisms in each ecosystem.  I thought I was so clever to use my stamps to create ecosystems, until I read the document more closely and saw that that was one of the recommendations for making the ecosystems for students to analyze.

I scanned the stamped ecosystems and put the pdf on Google Classroom so students to use them when we did the lab together on Zoom. After we did it I decided that next time we do the lab, I'll have students put together an ecosystem themselves with some items from home that they can practice finding the diversity index of.  Right now I'm just glad we were still able to do the lab remotely and I look forward to doing it again next year. The pdf with all of the ecosystems is here.