Exercise 11: Biodiversity Conservation, Climate Change

and Our Ecological Footprint

Task Sheet
BSC 2011L Spring 2020
Task 1: Comparing Biodiversity in Hardwood Hammock Forest vs.
Suburban Lawn

1. What is biodiversity and how can it be measured?
2. How does a Berlese funnel work? How can you use this to measure biodiversity?
3. Which habitat, forest or lawn, would you expect to have higher plant species
richness? Soil invertebrate species richness? Explain why.
4. What ecosystem services do plants and soil invertebrates provide? Which habitat
provides more ecosystem services?

Task 2A: Data Analysis: Graphing Temperature Data Indicating Climate

Change

1. Explain the concept of open data and citizen science.
2. What are the two different kinds of data?
3. What are the different graphs we can use to present results? In which case would
we use each graph?

Use the site http://data.giss.nasa.gov to answer the following questions:

4. Who collected these data?
5. What methods did they use?
6. Is the dataset being used in this task raw or processed? If processed, what was done
to them?
7. The temperature dataset presents using temperature anomalies. What is a
temperature anomaly?
8. Why do you think these researchers chose to use anomalies rather than absolute
temperatures?

Use the temperature graph made in procedure B to answer the following questions. Make
sure you include your graph with the trendline, equation and r2.

9. What kind of graph was most appropriate for these data? Why?
10. What observations can you make just by looking at your data?
 11. What value did you get for the excel functions for SLOPE? INTERCEPT? RSQ? What
do these numbers tell you about your data?
12. Do these numbers correspond to the numbers in your graph? How do the three
functions used in Excel compare to each other and to the answer that you manually
calculated?

Task 2B: Calculate Carbon Storage of Various Trees

1. What is carbon sequestration? What are the different kinds of sequestration?

Use the equations/procedures on page 185 and the table of height and trunk diameters on
page 187 to fill out the table below.

Total Weight of CO2
Dry Weight Weight of C Weight of
Tree Weight sequestered/year
(lbs) in tree (lbs) CO2 in tree
(lbs) (lbs)
Delonix
regia
Quercus
virginiana
Swietenia
mahagoni
Bucida
buceras
Sabal
palmetto

2. Which of these trees sequesters the most carbon per year? The least?
3. How does the yearly amount of carbon sequestered by each species correlate to the
morphology of that species?

Task 2C: Calculate Your Ecological Footprint

Use the information from your quiz results from footprintcalculator.org to answer the
following questions.

1. What is your personal Earth Overshoot Day? How does it compare to the Earth
Overshoot Day for humanity for the previous year?
2. According to the report, how many Earths (biocapacity) does your lifestyle require?
3. What is your ecological footprint (in global hectares of land)? How does the
amount of land needed to support your way of life compare to the calculated
amount of land that should ideally be available to each person?
 4. According to the “By Consumption Category” graph, what is the biggest part of your
footprint (food, shelter, mobility, or goods) besides services?
5. How might you reduce the impact of this biggest part (besides services, which are
collective impacts that individuals cannot directly reduce) of your footprint? There
are some ideas at https://en.reset.org/act/reduce-your-ecological- footprint-0, you
can “explore solutions” at the end of your quiz, or you can do your own research.
Please use your own words (i.e., do not quote), be realistic, and propose ideas more
insightful than ‘recycle more.’
6. What is your carbon footprint? Give estimates both in tonnes of CO2 emitted per
year, and as a percentage of your total ecological footprint?
7. How might you reduce your carbon footprint, which is mostly from the energy use,
industrial agriculture, and deforestation needed to maintain your lifestyle (and
eventually, that of your children). Please use your own words (i.e., do not quote), be
realistic, and propose ideas more insightful than ‘recycle more.’
8. Reducing our individual footprints is a great start, but we need to go further. How
might we work together to reduce the footprint of your neighborhood, university,
city or region? See https://www.useful-community-development.org/ carbon-
footprint.html and https://www.drawdown.org/solutions for some ideas. You may
mention several ideas, but then discuss one idea for community effort in some
depth, and in your own words.

Task 2D: Estimate Trees Needed to Offset Annual Carbon Emissions

1. What is your Personal Carbon Footprint (in CO2 emissions in tonnes per year)?
2. Convert your carbon footprint to lbs using the following conversion:
1 tonne = 2,204.62 lbs

Use this information, along with your table from Task 2B, to fill out the table below:

Number of
Weight of
trees needed Ideal area
CO2 Total area
Tree to Offset needed per
sequestered needed
Personal C tree
per year
footprint
Delonix
2500 ft2
regia
Quercus
5625 ft2
virginiana
Swietenia
900 ft2
mahagoni
Bucida
1600 ft2
buceras
Sabal
100 ft2
palmetto
 3. Which species of tree would be best to plant if you wanted to occupy as little space
as possible while still offsetting your carbon footprint?
4. How does the land area needed by different trees compare to your ecological
footprint?