Learning Goals
Students will be able to model how producers, consumers, and decomposers transfer energy and cycle nutrients through a Biosphere 3 food web to support ecosystem balance over time.
Students will be able to analyze how interactions among organisms, including feeding relationships and group behaviors, affect the stability and resilience of a closed ecosystem.
Students will be able to develop and revise a labeled Biosphere 3 model showing interactions among the biosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and atmosphere to explain how water, soil, air, and living things support a food system.
Students will be able to defend and improve a claim about whether a Biosphere 3 design can provide a balanced food system using scientific evidence, reasoning, feedback, and before-and-after comparisons.
Products
Biosphere 3 Ecosystem Design and Evidence Notebook
Each student independently creates an annotated food web and Earth-systems diagram, evaluates what will and will not work, and records a claim-evidence-reasoning defense. The notebook includes a before-and-after comparison explaining how peer or community-partner feedback informed a specific revision.
Revised Biosphere 3 Model and Ecosystem Pitch
Each team builds a labeled model with captions and arrows showing organisms, energy flow, nutrient cycling, and Earth-system interactions, then presents a claim-and-defense at Ecosystem Pitch Night. The pitch uses before-and-after models to explain testing, feedback-driven revisions, trade-offs, limitations, and how the design could better sustain a balanced food system.
No rubric has been generated yet.