Biology is designed for multi-semester biology courses for science majors. It is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand. To meet the needs of today’s instructors and students, some content has been strategically condensed while maintaining the overall scope and coverage of traditional texts for this course. Instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand—and apply—key concepts.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Define biodiversityDescribe biodiversity as the equilibrium of naturally fluctuating rates of extinction and speciationIdentify historical causes of high extinction rates in Earth’s history

This module explores the introduction of the American bullfrog on their ecosystem. Using species diversity calculations and data collection techniques, students explore how the bullfrog affected the species in its community. Students are introduced to calculations like species richness, species evenness, and species diversity indices. Also, this activity provides students an understanding of how this information is gathered in the field and provides them an opportunity to learn how to collect data themselves.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is used to cure a variety of blood-, immune-, and metabolism-related disorders. However, there are still many serious, even deadly, complications that can arise post-transplantation. Research in adults has suggested that the gut microbiota influences post-transplantation outcomes, but little is known about its role for pediatric patients. To reduce this gap, researchers recently examined the microbial and metabolic profiles of pediatric HSCT patients from a single hospital center. At time of admission, the gut microbial species diversity in HSCT patients was lower than the diversity in healthy controls. This diversity dropped even lower after transplantation, and for most, it did not return to baseline levels. An algorithm identified three community state ‘clusters’ that were characterized by the dominant bacterial groups within them. Cluster 1 was common pre-transplantation, while clusters 2 and 3 were common post-transplantation..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Consistent confirmations obtained independently of each other lend credibility to a scientific result. We refer to results satisfying this consistency as reproducible and assume that reproducibility is a desirable property of scientific discovery. Yet seemingly science also progresses despite irreproducible results, indicating that the relationship between reproducibility and other desirable properties of scientific discovery is not well understood. These properties include early discovery of truth, persistence on truth once it is discovered, and time spent on truth in a long-term scientific inquiry. We build a mathematical model of scientific discovery that presents a viable framework to study its desirable properties including reproducibility. In this framework, we assume that scientists adopt a model-centric approach to discover the true model generating data in a stochastic process of scientific discovery. We analyze the properties of this process using Markov chain theory, Monte Carlo methods, and agent-based modeling. We show that the scientific process may not converge to truth even if scientific results are reproducible and that irreproducible results do not necessarily imply untrue results. The proportion of different research strategies represented in the scientific population, scientists’ choice of methodology, the complexity of truth, and the strength of signal contribute to this counter-intuitive finding. Important insights include that innovative research speeds up the discovery of scientific truth by facilitating the exploration of model space and epistemic diversity optimizes across desirable properties of scientific discovery.

Understanding Biodiversity presents an overview of biodiversity, its importance and relevance to humans, all living things, and the Earth. It includes species pages and a template to engage and involve students in real-life data collection.

Interactive online tutorial about growing urchin larvae in a lab setting. Students manipulate data and are led through a lab-based situation. There is a module on ocean acidification. Lesson plans can be downloaded from website.