How Many Squirrels can an Oak Forest Support?

Project #3305 on iSENSEProject.org

The purpose of this project is to allow students to better understand the relationship between the characteristics of an individual forest and the number of squirrels that could be supported by that forest, otherwise described as carrying capacity.  Each forest in this project includes up to 5 different oak species, with a different number and age distribution of trees in each forest.

This data has been provided for students to practice interpretation of the data before creating their own visualizations of their own oak forests. 

Three saved visualizations are provided, but students are encouraged to explore all the visualization options available, including the data table showing all of the raw data which comprises this project.

Guiding Questions:

After viewing the visualizations, students should be able to answer the following questions:

1.  Do more trees always mean more squirrels?  (HINT:  use a scatterplot with "number of trees" on the x-axis and "carrying capacity" on the y-axis.)

2.  Alderbrook and Danvick Park have the same number of trees.  Do they have the same carrying capacity?   

3.  What other factors, besides number of trees or differences in types of species, will affect carrying capacity?  In other words, what information is not shown here, but influences the calculation of carrying capacity for squirrels?

Modified from a Lesson obtained from Ginny Rehberg via the Facebook National APES Teachers discussion group.