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Biodiversity is the variety of all life on Earth. Scientists have described about 1.7 million species, most of them insects, and they think there are millions more.

One simple way to measure biodiversity is species richness: the number of different species in an area.

Living things depend on one another, and people depend on biodiversity for clean air, food, drinking water and products such as medicines, clothing and paper.

Experiment: Wild corner or mown lawn: which has more species?

1. Write a prediction: which area will have more plant species, the mown lawn or the wild corner?
2. Plan a fair test: use the same size of frame and the same number of samples in each area.
3. In the mown lawn, put the frame down in 5 different places, without choosing the 'interesting' spots (for example, walk a set number of steps each time).
4. In each frame, count how many different kinds of plant you can see. You do not need their names: 'plant A', 'plant B' is fine.
5. Repeat with 5 frames in the wild corner.
6. Calculate the average number of species per frame for each area and compare.

Frame	Mown lawn: number of species	Wild corner: number of species
1
2
3
4
5
Average

Questions

1. Write your results: the average number of species per frame in each area. Which area had the higher species richness?

2. Name two things you kept the same to make the test fair.

3. Give two reasons why people need biodiversity.

4. 48,646 of 172,620 species on the Red List are threatened. Is that more or less than a quarter?

   more / less

Sources for every fact on this sheet: echoesof.science/school/biodiversity/sources/

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