Data Nuggets Org Content Uploads 2014 Birds Chocolate Student C

Cocoa beans used to make chocolate!

The activities are as follows:

• Teacher Guide
• Student activity, Graph Blazon A, Level 2
• Student activity, Graph Type B, Level ii
• Student activeness, Graph Type C, Level two
• Grading Rubric

Nearly 9,000 years ago humans invented agronomics as a way to grow enough food for people to consume. Today, agriculture happens all over the world and takes upwards 40% of Earth's land surface. To make space for our food, humans must clear large areas of country, which creates a drastic change, or disturbance, to the habitat. This country-clearing disturbance removes the native plants already there including trees, small flowering plants, and grasses. Many types of animals including mammals, birds, and insects depend on these native plants for food or shelter. Big scale disturbances can make information technology difficult to live in the surface area. For example, a woodpecker bird cannot live somewhere that has no trees because they live and notice their food in the trees.

Even so, some agriculture might assistance some animals because they tin can use the crops being grown for the food and shelter they need to survive. 1 example is the cacao tree, which grows in the rainforests of Southward America. Humans use the seeds of this found to brand chocolate, so it is a very important crop! Cacao trees need very fiddling low-cal. They grow best in a unique habitat called the forest understory, which is composed of the shorter copse and bushes under the large trees found in rainforests. To get a lot of cacao seeds for chocolate, farmers need to have large rainforest trees above their cacao trees for shade. In many ways, cacao farms resemble a native rainforest. Many native plant species grow there and there are withal taller tree species. However, these farms are different in of import ways from a native rainforest. For example, there are many more short understory trees in the farm than there are in native rainforests. Also, there are fewer pocket-sized flowering plants on the ground because humans that work on cacao farms trample them as they walk around the subcontract.

Office I:Skye is a biologist who wanted to know whether rainforest birds use the forest when they are disturbed by adding cacao farms. Skye predicted she would see many fewer birds in the cacao farms, compared to the rainforest. To mensurate bird abundance, she merely counted birds in each habitat. To do this she chose one rainforest and one cacao farm and fix upwardly ii transects in each. Transects are parallel lines along which the measurements are taken. She spent iv days counting birds along each transect, for a total of 8 days in each habitat. She had to get up really early and count birds between half dozen:00 and 9:00 in the morning because that's when they are well-nigh active.

Role II:Skye was shocked to see so many birds in cacao farms! She decided to take a closer look at her data. Skye wanted to know how the types of birds she saw in the cacao farms compared to the types of birds she saw in the rainforest. She predicted that cacao farms would have different types of birds than the undisturbed rainforest. She thought the bird types would differ because each habitat has dissimilar types of food available for birds to swallow and different types of plants for birds to live in.

Skye bankrupt her affluence information down to look more than closely at four types of birds:

1. Toucans (Swallow: big insects and fruit from big trees, Live: holes in large trees)
2. Hummingbirds (Eat: nectar from flowers, Live: tree branches and leaves)
3. Wrens (Swallow: small insects, Alive: small-scale shrubs on the woods floor)
4. Flycatchers (Eat: Small insects, Live: tree branches and leaves)

Featured scientist: Skye Greenler from Colorado College and Purdue University

Flesch–Kincaid Reading Course Level = 8.5

Boosted teacher resource related to this Data Asset:

• The research described in this activity has been published. The commendation and a PDF of the scientific paper can exist found here:
  • Greenler, S.M. and J.J. Ebersole (2015) Bird communities in tropical agroforestry ecosystems: an underappreciated conservation resource. Agroforestry Systems 89: 691–704.
• The complete dataset for the study has been published to a data repository and is bachelor for classroom utilise. This dataset has even more data than what is in the Data Nugget activity. While the Information Asset has data for just ii habitats (cacao and rainforest), the full dataset also includes two other agroforest habitat types. The dataset also includes data for every species (169) recorded during the report, whereas the Data Nugget only has information for four families (toucans, wrens, flycatchers, hummingbirds).
• Study Location: Skye's study took place in a 10 km ⁱⁱ  mixed rainforest, pasture, agro-woods, and monoculture landscape near the hamlet of Pueblo Nuevo de Villa Franca de Guácimo, Limón Province, Costa Rica (ten ˚ 20˝ Due north, 83 ˚ 20˝ Westward), in the Caribbean lowlands 85 km northeast of San José.
• For more background on the importance of biodiversity, students tin can consume this article in The Guardian – What is biodiversity and why does information technology thing to us?

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About Skye:As a child Skye was always asking why; questioning the behavior, characteristics, and interactions of plants and animals effectually her.  She spent her childhood reconstructing deer skeletons to understand how bones and joints functioned and creating countless mini-ecosystems in plastic bottles to sentry how they inverse over time.  This dear of discovery, observation, questioning, and experimentation led her to many technician jobs, contained research projects, and graduate enquiry study at Purdue University.  At Purdue she studies the factors influencing oak regeneration after ecologically based timber harvest and prescribed fire.  While Skye's primary focus is ecological research, she loves getting to get out the lab and bring science into classrooms to inspire the next generation of young scientists and encourage all students to exist always request why!

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Source: https://datanuggets.org/2014/04/is-chocolate-for-the-birds/

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