G12 – Class Spotlight: Environmental Systems and Societies (ESS): Assessing Biodiversity

In the Grade 12 IBDP Environmental Systems and Societies (ESS) class, students explore the relationship between human society and the natural world through a range of global environmental issues. The course gives students an interdisciplinary learning experience by drawing on both social science and natural science approaches.

Another key feature of this course is that students learn how to collect and analyze data for themselves. On this day, they carried out fieldwork to assess biodiversity in the school grounds. Using the quadrat method, they counted the number of plant species and calculated the Simpson index.