Bio/Diversity Project Data Science Outreach Program

A 7-lesson K–12 curriculum on Sonoran Desert biodiversity, data science, and citizen science.

About

Students learn to collect, clean, analyze, and visualize real bird diversity data using wildlife camera images, Excel, and Zooniverse. Lessons progress from field observation through data visualization to poster presentations.

Lessons

1. Introduction to Sonoran Desert Pollinators
2. Let's Talk Birds!
3. Introduction to Bird Identification
4. Introduction to Data Cleaning
5. Using Excel to Calculate Diversity
6. Introduction to Data Visualization with Excel
7. Creating Student Posters

Dataset Requirements

This curriculum relies on real wildlife camera data. Before teaching, you'll need to:

• Capture or source wildlife camera photos preferably from your site (garden, school grounds, local park)
• Create a Zooniverse project using the Project Builder (see lesson 4)
• Upload your photos as a subject set and build a two-question workflow:
  1. "Is there a bird in this photo?"
  2. ID species
• This data is used for lessons 5-7!

Dataset Options

• Use your own wildlife camera images
• Use the Spring 2025 BDP dataset as a template or reference
• Adapt an existing Zooniverse wildlife project for your region

Lesson 4 includes a better guide for building a Zooniverse project from scratch.

Build & deploy the course site

Built with Quarto. Output is in docs/ for GitHub Pages.

To rebuild:

quarto render