More Ecological Techniques

Edexcel A-level BiologyThe Nature of EcosystemsLesson 36 of 39

Quadrats work for plants and slow-moving animals, but mobile animals need other methods.

Collecting invertebrates
- Pitfall trap: a container sunk into the ground to catch ground-dwelling animals such as beetles. Cover it to keep out rain and check it often.
- Sweep net: swept through long grass to catch insects.
- Pooter: a tube used to suck small insects into a container.
- Kick sampling: disturbing a stream bed so that animals wash into a net held downstream.
- Tullgren funnel: a lamp warms and dries a soil sample, so small animals move down into a collecting pot.

Mark-release-recapture
This estimates the population size of a mobile species:

More in The Nature of Ecosystems

• Quadrats
• ACFOR Scale
• Point Quadrats
• Permanent Quadrats
• Transects
• Hypothesis Testing
• Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient
• Student's t-Test

All 39 lessons in The Nature of Ecosystems · All Edexcel A-level Biology topics