Plant Biodiversity: complexity at multiple scales

“Biological diversity is more than species diversity. The study of biodiversity usually focuses on changes in species numbers in time and space. Life, however, is diverse at all scales.”

The role of theory in advancing 21st-century biology, NRC Report, 2008. p.

Scope of the project

Students will research, develop and write a review paper that describes a major group of plants across biological complexity scales (from molecules to ecosystems). The review paper will undergo formal peer review and revisions, and will be published on the course web page and accessible as a component of the students’ academic portfolio.

Summary

Teams (3-4 people) will select one group of plants and conduct research and share resources. Each team will choose one of the five broad plant groups listed on Page 3. information about the plant group of choice from a variety of sources (including textbooks, primary scientific literature, electronic resources, etc.), and synthesize such knowledge in a final product that will be initially formatted as a scientific review article. The article will be submitted to the class for peer review, and, after revision, will be posted online as a webpage, linked to the course website.

Proposed timeline

- Beginning of the semester: student teams choose the plant group of interest and begin collecting sources and drafting their papers;

- About two-thirds into the semester: students submit drafts, representing their best effort, to their classmates for peer review;

- End of the semester: teams revise their articles according to the reviewers’ comments, and present them to the class as mini-lectures on the plant group of choice (about 15 min).

Objectives

As a result of participating in this project, you will:

- describe and synthesize information plant biodiversity across scales of biological organization;

- collect and organize information on plants;

- communicate your findings in the form of a review paper;

- evaluate your peers’ review papers and provide feedback;

- contribute to a long-term, web-based plant biodiversity database (knowledge bank?).

Methods

Literature search

Possible sources: books, textbooks, websites (see “How to use the web for literature search” on the Course Website), journal articles, newspaper articles.

Writing guidelines

Content

Make sure you explore your group of plants at different levels:

- evolutionary (what do we know about the evolutionary history of this group of plants?)

- molecular and genetic (e.g., what do we know about genome(s) size and organization, genome sequencing efforts, molecular studies, etc…; are there any model species in this group? why or why not?);

- organismal: structures (e.g., what are the common morphological/anatomical characteristic of these plants or groups of plants, etc…) and functions (e.g., how do these plants reproduce, how do they transport water and nutrients within their bodies, etc…);

- ecological (e.g., distribution, abundance, ecosystem services, etc…)

- economical (e.g., use in agriculture, medicine, basic research, etc…)

Format

“Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” review articles (inclusive of text, figures, tables, charts, maps, text boxes, etc…).

Peer review

Rubric for peer review

Oral presentation

Biocore rubric

Elena Bray Speth1

Elena Bray Speth1