A biocube is a fun, informative, and manageable way of exploring the biodiversity in the world around you by focusing on a cubic foot of space. By looking closely and documenting the life in a small area, one can get a better understanding of how different ecosystems are structured and how they function.
If you are staying home or physically distancing due to public health precautions for Covid-19, here’s a simple way to try a Biocube project in your yard or nearby. Biocube At Home
Get information about the Life in One Cubic Foot traveling exhibit offered by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.
Studying the species that make up an ecosystem is the first step in understanding how biological systems function and predicting impacts of change. Describing this diversity by documenting life on the planet is the role of natural history museums.
Most of the world’s biodiversity occurs at small scales: organisms hidden in leaf litter, soil, and the nooks and crannies of environments. Thus, teachers and group leaders can facilitate highly relevant field biology exercises at this small, accessible scale. By focusing on a cubic foot of space, anyone, can characterize representative communities and begin to understand distributions, interactions, and relationships, just like scientists.
The Biocube program was inspired by a feature article in National Geographic that involved Smithsonian scientists and led to a book, "A World in One Cubic Foot: Portraits of Biodiversity." The biocubes featured in the book were documented by photographer David Liittschwager, assisted by a professional field crew and in consultation with various biologists. The cubes were from around the world and highlighted several things about biodiversity in small spaces, including a staggering number of nook and cranny species; almost every cubic foot they sampled yielded hundreds of species. The biocubes showed interesting differences among living communities from different continents, different habitats, and wild versus domesticated land.
What can we discover in just a cubic foot of Earth? As it turns out, a whole lot! Biocubes — the life in a cubic foot of soil or water over one day — capture enough variation to explore the complexity of entire ecosystems. You don’t have to be a professional wildlife photographer or biologist to investigate and report on a biocube.
Contact us at biocube@si.edu (link sends e-mail).
