With a continued focus on the Sonoran Desert, students are introduced to the concepts of biomes, limiting factors (resources), carrying capacity and growth curves through a PowerPoint® presentation. Abiotic factors (temperature, annual precipitation, seasons, etc.) determine the biome landscape. The vegetative component, as producers, determines the types of consumers that form its various communities. Students learn how the type and quantity of available resources defines how many organisms can be supported within the community, as well as its particular resident species. Students use mathematical models of natural relationships (in this case, sigmoid and exponential growth curves) to analyze population information and build upon it. With this understanding, students are able to explain how carrying capacity is determined by the limiting factors within the community and feeding relationships. By studying these ecological relationships, students see the connection between ecological relationships of organisms and the fundamentals of engineering design, adding to their base of knowledge towards solving the grand challenge posed in this unit.

Students become “raccoons” to look for one or more components of habitat during this physically involving activity.  Students will: 1) define a major component of habitat; 2) identify a limiting factor and 3) recognize the importance for suitable habitat.

Using Avida-ED freeware, students control a few factors in an environment populated with digital organisms, and then compare how changing these factors affects population growth. They experiment by altering the environment size (similar to what is called carrying capacity, the maximum population size that an environment can normally sustain), the initial organism gestation rate, and the availability of resources. How systems function often depends on many different factors. By altering these factors one at a time, and observing the results, students are able to clearly see the effect of each one.

This resource shows the interaction between the Canadian lynx (a predator) and the snowshoe hare (prey). This simulation lets you observe changes in hypothetical populations of lynx and hares over multiple generations to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the two species in an ecosystem.

Using three-dimensional scaffolds, these materials address the following topics:  - Interactions among living species.- 10% rule and carrying capacity.- Ecosystem disruptions, including climate change.  - Sustainability.  Each packet is broken into five parts - data dive, core ideas, investigations, asssessments, and life connections. Formative assessments and checkpoints are embedded throughout each packet. The final packet prepares students for a summative assessment, with a provided practice assessment.Implementation instructions are embedded for each component of each packet. PDFs are included as attachments (in case the file formats are altered by this system).