Practical exercises for community ecology at Advanced Level

It is often extremely difficult for teachers to find relatively short-term practical exercises appropriate for teaching community ecology at advanced school or first-year undergraduate level. This paper describes a series of short practicals, tried and tested in classrooms, in an attempt to offer some ideas. The practicals consider community structure in terms of standing crop biomass and community function by a study of system energy flow. The importance of the decomposer element of the ecological community is considered in a separate exercise, while a final practical examines the energy use of individual organisms. The series of exercises is deliberately presented in modular form so that teachers may opt to do single parts only, or to undertake the whole, linked package (perhaps suitable for a larger field course).