Topic 4: Biodiversity and natural resources (Edexcel SNAB)

This lesson bundle contains 11 lesson PowerPoints and their accompanying resources which are filled with a wide variety of tasks to motivate and engage the students whilst covering the detailed content of topic 4 of the Pearson Edexcel A-level Biology A (Salters Nuffield) specification. Extensive planning has gone into each lesson to ensure that understanding is complete and that students are challenged to make links to previously covered topics.

The tasks include exam-style questions, differentiated tasks, guided discussion points and quick quiz competitions and together these cover the following specification points in topic 4:

• The meaning of the terms biodiversity and endemism
• Measuring biodiversity within a habitat using species richness and within a species by calculating the heterozygosity index
• Comparing biodiversity between habitats by calculating an index of diversity
• The concept of niche and examples of behavioural, anatomical and physiological adaptations
• Natural selection can lead to adaptation and evolution
• The Hardy-Weinberg equation can be used to see whether a change in allele frequency is occurring in a population over time
• Reproductive isolation can lead to the formation of new species
• Classification is built around the species concept
• Critical evaluation of new data by the scientific community, which leads to new taxonomic groupings
• The ultrastructure of plant cells
• The structure and function of the polysaccharides starch and cellulose
• The similarities and differences between the structures, position and function of sclerenchyma fibres, xylem vessels and phloem
• The importance of water and inorganic ions to plants
• Evaluate the methods used by zoos and seed banks in the conservation of endangered species and their genetic diversity

If you would like to sample the quality of the lessons in this bundle, then download the isolation and speciation, ultrastructure of plant cells and xylem, phloem and sclerenchyma lessons as these have been uploaded for free