The Importance of Healthy Ecosystems

1. Period 1: Presentation slides 1-8 (the bee-truck phenomenon, targets, what counts as an ecosystem service, four kinds of services, vocabulary, the meadow's soil work, and the service-resource-neither check). Use the W1 phenomenon worksheet alongside slide 2; W2 vocabulary sort for homework.
2. Period 2: Lab 1, The Cotton-Swab Orchard (one session): three orchard layouts and a half-the-bees trial, with results posted to the class table before the bell.
3. Period 3: Slides 9-14 (pollination, blossom to almond, vocabulary, the California almond connection, the rent-the-bees discussion, the cross-pollination check). Groups finish the Lab 1 analysis questions; W5 data worksheet on orchard data and replacement cost for homework.
4. Period 4: Slides 15-21 (bananas and biodiversity, the vulture chain, the pattern-or-cause discussion, the small-change check, dunes and marshes, the San Francisco Bay connection, seawall versus dunes). W3 reading on India's vultures for homework and W7 misconception worksheet as review. Optional ninth period: the W8 jigsaw on bananas, biodiversity and disease after slide 15.
5. Period 5: Slides 22-24 (New York City's water, vocabulary, the criterion-or-constraint check), then Lab 2, Build a Better Filter, session 1: plan, build and run round 1.
6. Period 6: Lab 2 session 2: study the class table, redesign, retest and run the clog test. W4 diagram worksheet on how a watershed cleans water for homework; W6 CER on seawall or dunes as the next opener or homework.
7. Period 7: Lab 3, The Council Packet, session 1: cost calculations, budget packages, the weighted decision matrix and the group recommendation.
8. Period 8: Lab 3 session 2 (the council hearing and individual analysis), then slides 25-28 (the orchard pollination task, the clear-water misconception, synthesis, exit ticket). W9 transfer design challenge in pairs (finish for homework) and W10 mastery as the quiz at the start of the next lesson; preview Lesson 29.

Materials overview: Lab 1 uses printed orchard mats, blue and pink sidewalk chalk, cotton swabs, small round white labels as stigmas, a die and numbered slips per group. Lab 2 uses recycled 2-liter bottles cut by the teacher, play sand, pea gravel, cotton balls, coffee filters, bagged topsoil and dry leaves for simulated runoff, identical clear cups for teacher-made reference cups, measuring cups, timers and trays. Lab 3 is paper only: the council packet and a calculator. No flames, no heating, and no chemicals beyond soil and chalk; the filtered water in Lab 2 is never to be tasted.

• Multilingual learners: Pre-teach service, pollen, stigma, filter, cost and protect with picture cards and the gesture 'nature works, people benefit'. Provide sentence frames such as 'The ___ provides ___ because ___' and 'Option ___ costs more, but it ___'. Let groups write council recommendations in a home language first, then translate key sentences.
• Students who need more support: Give a Lab 1 mat with the B and P letters printed inside every blossom and a nut-set conversion strip (each blossom = 5 percent). In Lab 3, supply the cost table with the yearly-cost multiplication already set up (yearly cost × 30 = ___) and a matrix with scores filled in for two options as a model.
• Students ready for extension: Have students change the Lab 1 die rule so bees cross rows as often as they move along them and predict, then test, whether the layout ranking changes. Or have them read the New York City Filtration Avoidance Determination summary and list the watershed programs it requires, or compare the 1990s cost estimates for the filtration plant with the cost of the watershed program.
• Students who need movement or alternative output: Run Lab 1 as a floor orchard: twenty students hold blue or pink cards in a 4-by-5 grid and a 'bee' walks by the die rule carrying a sticky note that records the last variety visited. Accept a recorded spoken recommendation or a labeled poster for the Lab 3 council report.
• Students with limited fine-motor control or low vision: Use foam makeup swabs or a partner who moves the swab while the student directs and calls the die rolls; print mats in large format with tape texture on pink blossoms. In Lab 2, offer the Rater or Accountant role and a viewing card with five black lines of different thickness so clarity can be judged by counting visible lines.
• Students with asthma, allergies or skin sensitivity: In Lab 1 they can take the Navigator or Recorder role away from chalk dust; in Lab 2 provide gloves and the Rater or Accountant role, since bagged soil can carry mold spores and microbes.

• Almond timing and numbers: the textbook's phenomenon says bees are trucked in each spring. Almond bloom usually begins in mid-February and lasts about three to four weeks, so colonies arrive in winter, many of them in holding yards from December. The numbers change every year and differ by source: California has about 1.4 million acres of bearing almond orchards (about 1.40 million in 2025, per a January 2026 UC Davis and UC ANR market report citing Land IQ and USDA) and grows roughly 80 percent of the world's almonds; growers commonly stock about two colonies per acre for varieties that need cross-pollination and about one for self-fertile varieties; a 2025 farmdoc daily analysis estimated 2024 demand at about 2.7 million colonies, roughly 99 percent of the U.S. colonies counted on January 1, 2024, at an average fee of over $200 per colony. Always say 'about' or 'estimated' and give the year. The 'billions of bees' in the textbook is reasonable: a rented colony holds many thousands of bees, so the total runs into the tens of billions.
• Almond biology: most established almond varieties, including Nonpareil, the most widely planted, are self-incompatible; pollen from the same variety cannot fertilize them, so growers plant compatible pollinizer varieties that bloom at the same time, usually in alternating solid rows. Mixing varieties within a row has not proven consistently better in yield and is more costly to harvest. Self-fertile varieties such as Independence can set nuts with their own pollen and are usually stocked with fewer hives, though bees still raise their yields. The almond we eat is a seed; the fruit is a drupe related to peaches, with a leathery hull in place of juicy flesh.
• Honey bees and wild bees: honey bees (Apis mellifera) were brought from Europe by colonists and are a managed, introduced species; the United States has about 4,000 native bee species. A study of 23 California almond orchards (Klein et al., 2012) found wild bees visiting almond flowers only where orchards had adjacent semi-natural habitat or a strip of semi-natural vegetation, and a strip helped mainly at orchard edges. Lab 1's information card and q9 key follow this.
• Pollinator dependence (prior review RF1): Section 1 (p. 377) says that without pollinators farmers could not produce grains. Wheat, rice and corn are wind- or self-pollinated. About 87 of the 115 leading world food crops benefit from animal pollination, but those crops make up only about 35 percent of world crop production by volume (Klein et al., 2007). Green beans are self-pollinating, and navel and Valencia oranges can set fruit without pollination, so this chapter does not use them as pollinator-dependent examples.
• Bananas (RF2): Section 2 (p. 379) says Cavendish bananas are safe from Panama disease and are killed by yellow Sigatoka leaf spot. Cavendish resisted Race 1 of Panama disease (Fusarium wilt), which ended Gros Michel's export dominance, but it is susceptible to Tropical Race 4, the wilt now spreading through Cavendish plantations; yellow Sigatoka is a leaf-spot disease that lowers yield and has largely been displaced by black leaf streak. Gros Michel is not extinct; small farmers still grow it. Banana plants are giant herbs, not trees. Slide 15 teaches the corrected version.
• Vultures (RF3): Figure 3 (p. 381) plots vultures and feral dogs only; it shows no rabies data, and its numbers are estimates. Three Gyps vulture species in India fell by about 97 to 99.9 percent between 1992 and 2007 after the veterinary painkiller diclofenac came into wide use; India banned veterinary diclofenac in 2006. Later research (Frank and Sudarshan, American Economic Review, 2024) compared districts that had been good vulture habitat with districts that had few vultures and found human death rates rose by more than 4 percent where vultures vanished, through a broad sanitation shock in which more dogs and rabies are one likely pathway. Slides 16-17 present the dog-and-rabies chain as a supported explanation and use the district comparison to teach cause versus pattern.
• Rabies (RF4): the textbook calls rabies fatal without qualification. Once symptoms appear it is virtually always fatal, but it is preventable with prompt care after a bite; dogs cause about 99 percent of human cases (WHO). Teachers should not give medical advice beyond 'see a doctor after any animal bite'.
• Flooding (RF5): Section 4 (p. 383) says floods now cause more U.S. disaster deaths and property damage than any other natural hazard. FEMA supports 'most common and most costly'; the National Weather Service ranks heat as the leading weather-related killer. This chapter claims only the FEMA statement.
• Coastal buffers (RF8): the textbook says marshes and dunes absorb floodwater. They mainly act as barriers that take energy out of waves, slow water and hold sediment; NOAA notes that about 15 feet of marsh can absorb roughly half of incoming wave energy. Slides 19-21 use this wording.
• New York City (RF6): the textbook frames the problem as overloaded treatment plants and implies the water needs little treatment. In fact the Catskill/Delaware supply was unfiltered; federal rules adopted in 1989 required filtration unless a supplier met strict filtration-avoidance criteria, which the city has met since 1993 through watershed protection, including a 1997 agreement with upstate communities. The water is still disinfected and tested, and the smaller Croton system is filtered. The watershed is mostly forest, with farms, streams, wetlands and reservoirs, not mainly wetlands as the p. 384 caption says. In the 1990s the city estimated a Catskill/Delaware filtration plant could cost up to about $6 billion to build and more than $300 million a year to run, though an EPA-appointed expert panel argued filtration might cost as little as half that; the watershed strategy was budgeted at about $1.5 billion over ten years (National Research Council, 2000). Population and gallon figures are as of the textbook's writing; NYC DEP now says more than a billion gallons a day reach about nine million people.
• Decomposers and energy (RF7): Section 1 (p. 377) says decomposers use energy and matter and release nitrogen and carbon molecules into the soil. Matter is recycled into soil and air; the energy in dead matter is used by decomposers and leaves as heat. Much of the carbon returns to the air as carbon dioxide. Slide 7 says this plainly.
• Resources versus services (RF11): Section 1 (p. 377) says stone, minerals and metals come from Earth's ecosystems. They are natural resources formed by geology, not products of living ecosystems, and ecosystem-service frameworks do not count them. The p. 377 caption also implies a meadow's soil supplies a farm; a farm's fertility depends on decomposers in its own soil. Slides 4 and 7 and the vocabulary definitions separate these ideas.
• Service categories: slide 5, W2, W3 q9, W8 q6, W9 q1 and W10 q2 use the four groups of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005): provisioning (food, fiber, fresh water, genetic resources, biochemicals), regulating (water purification, erosion and flood regulation, pest and disease regulation, pollination, climate regulation), cultural (recreation, aesthetic, spiritual and educational value) and supporting (soil formation, nutrient cycling, primary production by photosynthesis). The assessment lists pollination as regulating; many school texts call it supporting, and later frameworks (TEEB, CICES) drop the supporting group to avoid counting the same process twice. Accept a different placement when the student gives a sound reason.
• Replacement cost is an economic method with limits: it estimates the value of a service by the price of a substitute, which can overstate value when nobody would actually build the substitute and understate it because a substitute does one job while an ecosystem provides many. All Lab 3 and slide 25 numbers are invented teaching values and are labeled simulated.
• OCR gaps (RF9): p. 374 is a full-page photo, the p. 375 title is cut off, the p. 378 service wheel labels and parts of the p. 381 graph are missing from the text file. The slide 5 concept map sorts the wheel's services into the four groups described in the next note, not the publisher's layout.