Aim

To explore what clues plants provide about the environmental conditions in an area.

National Curriculum themes

KS4 Sc1 2b -"decide whether to use evidence from first-hand experience or secondary sources"
KS4 Sc1 2c - "carry out preliminary work and make predictions, where appropriate"
KS4 Sc1 2k - "use diagrams, tables, charts and graphs, and identify and explain patterns or relationships in data"
KS4 Sc1 2o - "use scientific knowledge and understanding to explain and interpret observations, measurements or other data, and conclusions"
KS4 Sc2 5a - "how the distribution and relative abundance of organisms in habitats can be explained using ideas of ... adaptation."

Look at maps of your local area. Ask pupils to try to identify different landscape features. Use the Look up an area search engine to investigate the plants found in your postal district. Which plants would you expect to find in which areas?
Use the environmental maps (available from the Tools menu) to establish temperature, rainfall, geology and elevation data for your area.

Visit local habitats. Try to identify the different plant species in each area using field guides.

Ask pupils to enter a local postal district code in the Comparing areas activity, and one from another part of the country. Ask them to compare the areas in terms of size (gridcells), total number of plants, and the number of rarer plants.
Tell pupils that each plant has been given environmental indicator values for light, moisture, soil nitrogen, pH, and salt. These values represent the conditions in which that plant is typically found in the UK.
Tell pupils that the values for the rarer plants in the two postal districts have been plotted on the histograms. What do the histograms show? What clues do they provide about environmental conditions in the two areas?
Look again at the environmental maps. How does the plant data correlate with the rainfall and geology data?