Purpose: The purpose of this lab is to calculate the biodiversity of a community using mathematical equations and to calculate the richness and evenness of a community.
Background: The biodiversity is being calculated in parking lots. Some important aspects of calculation biodiversity includes richness and evenness. To explain, species richness is simply a count of species present in a particular area and species evenness is a measure of the relative abundance of the different species making up the richness of an area. A way to calculate this would be to use the Simpson’s Biodiversity Index; this method was used for this experiment.
Hypothesis: If measuring the biodiversity of the faculty parking lot and the student lot, then the diversity…show more content… Each group is responsible sampling a portion of the parking lot (Faculty and Student) community.
4. Hopefully there will not be much immigration or emigration (cars coming and going) during our sampling time. But, if you do notice some, use your best judgment.
5. No individual car may be skipped.
6. Your "species"(car) will be based on the make of the automobile (e.g. Ford, Dodge, Honda, Chevy, etc.).
7. If you are having difficulty classifying a "species", you must come to a decision as a team.
8. When complete, you will come together into your larger group and share the data collected from each lot with one another.
9. Individually calculate the Simpson’s Diversity Index for each parking lot. It is YOUR responsibility to organize the data into a chart and do all of the calculations. You may do calculations by hand or use a spreadsheet. You must provide an example of each calculation in your lab write-up.
10. Individually determine the Species Richness, Relative Species Evenness, and Relative Level of Species Dominance for each lot. These, along with the Diversity calculations, will be included in the data section of your lab write up.
Data Table: Table 1, Biodiversity in the Student Lot