In this activity, students will learn about different measures of biodiversity: richness, Shannon diversity index, and evenness. Students will begin by calculating these indices by hand using a very small sample data set. Students will then read an overview of the Northern Lakes and Forests and Southern Wisconsin Till Plains, two different Wisconsin ecoregions, and use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to calculate and compare biodiversity from a Snapshot Wisconsin database

In this lesson, students explore an analogy that helps them troubleshoot a problem in an electric circuit. They will then use computer simulations to reconstruct the problem and test other solutions.