Parking Lot Lab Report

The purpose of this lab was to discover how diverse the parking lot at Bunker Hill High School could be, by finding out the Shannon Wiener biodiversity index of the parking lot. The parking lot was used because it does not have much immigration and emigration of the cars. Using an actual ecosystem in the wild would be hard to control, what is immigrating and emigrating out of the experiment. The experiment shows how diverse the cars were, and this can show how diverse an actual ecosystem was during that time of the experiment. This then tells that diversity does matters because if everyone had the same kind of car, then no one would be different. However, if the students, faculty, and guests had a variety of cars in the parking lot, which made the experiment more diverse in the parking lot or the community of cars.

The Shannon Wiener index is a way to look at measurements of many diverse species, this index is determined by both the number of species and the even distribution of individuals among those species (relative dominance).

(http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O7-densityfrequencydominance.html) Biodiversity is the number of richness or the number of species in a local area. This happens when someone can look at a species, in order to indicate a degree of uncertainty. This can happen by calculating the number of species given, where the individual is picked at random from the community. In other words, if the diversity is high, then oneself will have a poorer chance of correctly calculating the species of the next individual picked at random. (http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/bioed/bealsmodules/shannonDI.html) This experiment was a way to find out the diversity of the school parking lot and the possibility to identify the type or model of the student’s, faculties and guest

cars.
Methods (~1 page)
When the students started this lab, the teacher gave two data tables to every student. The teacher told the students that one table was for the student’s cars and the other table was for the faculty cars. Each table was labeled to collect the type of cars the students saw, and how many of the students saw that type of car; the "pi” ( which was the ratio of the number of the cars divided by the total number of cars in that table. Also in the data table, “ln(pi)” ( which was the natural log of the pi), and the last column consisted of putting all the columns together ( which was the Shannon Wiener Index). Students don’t worry about Shannon Wiener because the students calculated this after counting the types of cars. Each data table was labeled from one to forty, and before the students went outside to the parking lot, the students named the types of cars the students could think of.
The class took a trip outside to the parking lot of BHHS students and faculty parking lot, where the teacher had split the students into teams. (The number of students in each group depended on how many rows of cars were in the parking lot. That determined the number of students that were in each group.) Once the students were split into groups, the teacher told the groups to pick a row and go down the row and count the number of cars the students of that group saw by putting a tally mark beside the type of car it was. Many of the faculty cars were mixed in with the students cars, so the teacher made sure the students knew which cars were the teachers and which were not. After the students finished collecting the data, the students and the teacher went back to class and analyzed the data that was collected.
The students and teacher made sure that the data from the parking lot experiment was all the same for every student. The students and teacher finished putting the information together, which showed the total number of cars for students was one hundred and ninety-six, and the total number of cars for the faculty was sixty-nine. This experiment took a whole class period (an hour and 30 mins) to complete the parking lot excursion.
Results (2 pages)
Each column was calculated, by individually calculating each row of both the students and faculty data table (see tables below). In the column, “pi”, the data was calculated by using the formula: pi=niN. Where ni is the number of individuals in the parking lot of that species (the type of car) divided by the total number of species (number of cars) are in the parking lot. In the student data table, the total number of individuals in the parking lot was one hundred and ninety-six cars (N). In the teacher data table, the total number of individuals in the parking lot was sixty-nine cars (N). In the next two columns, the use of the Shannon Diversity Index was needed. The formula for the Shannon Diversity Index is H' = -i=1S[pi(ln(pi))]. In the first column of the two columns, “Ln(pi)”, the natural log (Ln) is taken of the pi (niN), this results in a negative number for every car species.