Measuring Biodiversity with Probability

More and more, teachers are asked to make connections between the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—while also addressing state standards. Mathematics is an underappreciated but important tool for the life sciences, from mathematically modeling biological processes to making sense of biological data. The activity presented here was designed for a Girls in Science camp, held at Tremont, Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The camp is designed to give local girls entering eighth grade a chance to become familiar with the natural world by doing hands-on research in the park. This particular exercise was designed to show the value of mathematics for quantifying and interpreting biodiversity data that the girls had collected.