Biodiversity
Introduction
Biodiversity is becoming an increasing concern for scientists and many governments. To prevent further erosion of our natural heritage, time has come to invest time, money, personnel, and material into threatened third world countries. These countries need additional support and materials to stabilize environmental degradation and to improve the quality of life.
Guiding Question
Which third world country has the greatest need for immediate help?
Your
Assemble teams with your
classmates. Each team member will assume one of the following roles. Each team
member is also responsible for recommending solutions to the problems identifed by his or her research. Together, your team will
research a third world country and create a report using slides designed to
convince the United Nations to fund your country. Each team member must
contribute to a bibliography by providing citations (URLs and page titles) of
where the information or photo was found online.
1. Environmental Impact
Specialist: Reports on human impact on wildlands.
Find at least one example of degradation of wildlands.
Describe the situation (include photos). How should this problem be remediated?
2. Demographer: Reports on population statistics, endangered ethnic/racial
groups, morbidity, mortality, and quality of life measurements.
Find total population, age structure, male/female structure, birth and death
rate, child mortality and causes thereof, sanitation and water availability,
civil disturbance with resulting migration, endangered ethnic and racial groups
within the country.
3. Botanist: Reports on
native plants and their status.
Report on indigenous plants for your country. Include 15 plants (5 trees, 5
shrubs, 5 flowers) with scientific names, common names, status report and
photos.
4. Zoologist: Reports on
native animals and their status.
Find indigenous animals for your country. Include 15 animals (5 mammals, 5
birds, 5 from other categories) with scientific names, common names, status
report and photos.
5. Health Officer: Reports
on endemic diseases, impact, prognosis, and control.
Find 5 endemic diseases for your country. Describe one vector-borne endemic
disease. Use standard disease report form. Include photos.
6. Nutrition/Food Security
Specialist: Reports on nutritional health of country and amount of and safety
of food supplies.
Find any nutritional issues for your country. If any prevalent diseases occur,
describe the disease symptoms and the effect of disease on academic ability and
ability to work. What is being done to remediate issues? Determine what issues
prevent remediation of nutritional issues.
7. Naturalist: Reports on
terrain.
Find photos of typical natural structures, mountains, and biomes in your
country. Identify. Do not use any manmade structures or altered environments.
8. Geographer: Collects and
designs maps for all areas/fields. Must work closely with
other members on team to find out the types of maps needed for each team
member.
Maps included should be biomes, temperature, rainfall, country, location on
globe, vegetation, maybe animal locations, mountain ranges, rivers, lakes,
ethnic groupings, disease, forest, soil, areas of degradation, land
alternation, land use (pie chart).
9. Agriculturalist: Reports
on agricultural products, soil degradation/remediation, sustainability.
Find the most important agricultural products (crops and animal goods if any).
Are any endangered or only found in this country? How much land is used and
cleared for new growth each year? What is the health of soil (mineral content,
water capacity, erosion, pollution)?
10. Forestry Specialist:
Reports types of trees grown and harvested, soil degradation.
Find 5 native species that are harvested. Find other commercial trees that are
harvested. How is land used and cared for?
11. Hydrologist: Reports on
water sources, clean water status.
Find all rivers and lakes in the country. What sources do they come from, where
do they exit? What is happening to the watersheds? How do people access clean
water for their daily needs?
12. Facilitator: Monitors
progress of team members and makes sure team stays on track.
Gather each members Powerpoint slides and organizes
slides into a presentation. Chooses color schemes for slides. Compiles bibliography from other team members at end of
presentation. Makes sure all parts of presentation are done and complete
and completes any missing parts. Presides over the team's
effort to write proposal/conclusion. Makes sure that the proper graphs
and tables are included: tables for botany, zoology and forestry (scientific
name, common name and status); graphs (line, bar, and pie (land use).
13. Presenter(s):
Present(s) report to class on assigned date.
Internet Resources
Center For Disease Control and Prevention
California Academy of Science
National Geographic
World Health Organization
The Nature Conservancy
United Nations Children's Fund
Voices of Youth
WWF
Food And Agriculture Organization Of The United
Nations
Encarta Encyclopedia
The Left Hand Network
The Conservation Organization
OneWorld.net
The World Wide Web Virtual Library:Forestry
Best Water Pollution and
Conservation Websites
IDB Summary Demographic Data
Earth Trends: The Environment
Information Portal
Best Environmental Resources
Directories
Geo Data Portal
Ms. Andrejeff,
Teacher, and Geraldine Leung, AP student, collaborated
to develop this web hunt.