Surveying and analyzing the diversity of produce in urban marketplaces: A concrete route to teaching abstract concepts

Background/Question/Methods Anyone attempting to introduce quantitative community ecology into a college-level ecology or botany course faces a serious challenge. One wants students to gain familiarity with some basic methods and concepts such as species diversity metrics or indices for comparing species compositions of stands or communities. Ambitiously, one can push students to learn about various community classification or ordination techniques. Ideally, students should use data that they collect themselves as they pursue these goals, and many instructors accomplish this by following a traditional path. They bring students on field trips to forested habitats, teach basic tree identification skills, training students in a sampling technique or two, and collect a lot of data. They can then use classroom or computer-lab time to teach and practice the analytical techniques and their interpretation. While this approach is enjoyable for field-oriented students, it can be expensive, time-consuming, and challenging for those learning at urban campuses.

Results/Conclusions At Barnard College, a liberal arts campus for women affiliated with Columbia University in the City of New York, I augment work in nearby natural forests and parks with surveys of produce diversity in nearby city marketplaces. This allows students to alleviate their struggles with species identification, rapidly compiling data sets that include very large numbers of species. These data sets are extremely versatile and useful for teaching important lessons about species richness, patterns of community similarity, taxonomic bias, and other topics. The ease of amassing data fosters the students’ creativity in formulating working hypotheses, after which they begin to think hard about appropriate sampling strategies and more rigorous hypothesis tests. This laboratory exercise also opens the door to exploring how plant community ecology intersects with allied fields including ethnobotany, the globalization of agro-ecological commodities, and environmental justice. This talk will quickly summarize a lesson plan and also showcase several innovative projects accomplished by students.