Lauren Henry's webquest Biomes of the world Project: Create your own brochure and travel itinerary for clients to follow along with when they visit your selected biome.

Introduction:

Earth is covered by hundreds of types of ecosystems.  For convenience, ecologists divide these into a few biomes.  Biomes are areas that have distinctive climates and organisms.  Each biome contains many individual ecosystems.  The locations of the major biomes are determined by latitude, temperature, and precipitation.  Biomes are named according to their plant life because the plants that can grow in an area determine what other organisms can live there.  The nine biomes that cover our earth are tropical rain forest, temperate rain forest, temperate deciduous forest, taiga, tropical savanna, temperate grassland, desert, tundra, and mountains.  After completing this assignment, you will be able to define Biomes, compare and contrast the world’s forest biomes, and describe plant and animal adaptations in each kind of forest.

Task:

Today, more and more people are showing interest in educational travel opportunities.  To serve this market, we would like to offer interesting and exciting travel tours to the world’s major biomes.  Your assignment will be to design and advertise a biome adventure tour that takes travelers to different places around the globe.  However, all of the destinations on your tour must belong to a single biome.

In order for you and a partner to complete your travel brochure and poster you will need to complete and include the following:

1. Research information on-line about a biome of your choice
2. Collect pictures of the biome for your brochure
3. Create a brochure that would want to make people chose your travel agent to take a trip with.  So you need to find out   wonderful things about your biome and include that in the brochure.  In your brochure make sure you include four different places you can travel to experience your biome.  Include activities you can do in your biome.  Example: If you want to visit the tundra you can go whale watching!   Also include examples of how many different species of plants, or animals, temperature during the day/night, neat places to visit, etc.  Your brochure is how you get people to book their trips with you.  Secondly, you need to create an itinerary for a client that's included in the brochure.  This means you need to plan a trip for someone.  This breaks down for the client day by day what they will be doing.  Please include four destinations in your itinerary.  Be as creative as you want but they must be real places.  You have to also be careful of your time for the itinerary which means you need to determine how long they are going on the trip, how long they stay at one particular destination, consider travel time, visiting time, where they are staying, etc….Good luck and have fun with this
4. Design a travel poster to advertise your biome adventure.  Use pictures that illustrate the characteristic features of your biome, as well as pictures that represent particular freatures of each destination on the trip.
   

Resources:

Materials and sites to visit listed below are recommended sites to visit to do more research on your particular biome you want to travel to.  Make sure you include animals, plants, and scenary each biome has to offer.  You can also use class notes and your ecology book for addtional resoursces.

http://www.2.kpr.edu.on.ca/cdciw/ biomes/research.htm

http://www.bio.miami.edu/dana/106/106F03_5.html

http://sevilleta.unm.edu/overview/orientation/biomes/

http://mbgnet.mobot.org/

Google

Yahoo

Scoring Rubric:

Category	1 Beginning	2 Developing	3 Accomplising	4 Exemplary	Score
Well defined Biome	Does not clearly define what lives in the biome	Defines what lives in the biome but does not explain why	Defines what is in the biome and why but a little misleading	Definition has a clear understanding and explains what lives in  the area and why
The Project includes four destinations	Only includes one destination	Only includes two destinations	Only includes three destinations	Includes all four destinations
Includes examples of climate and different organisms	Only gives an example of climate	Only gives an example of climate and one type of animal they may see	Only includes climate, one example of animals and plants	Includes a variety of examples of each
Well Organized	The project is not organized in any pattern	There are parts  missing from the project	The project could be neater and more organized	There is a definant flow of how things are ogranized in the presentation
Grammar and spelling are correct	There are numerous errors in the project	There are a few spelling and grammer mistakes	There are one or two grammar and spelling mistakes	There is no grammar or spelling mistakes

Conclusion:

Present your brochure and poster to another group.  Then allow that group to present their brochure and poster to you.  In each case, the group listening to the presentation should play the role of tourists by asking questions to learn about the bioime adventure that the other group has planned.  Record what you learn about the biome advertised by the group whose presentation you listen to.  Would you like to actually take the tour described in their brochure and poster?  Why or why not?