The Sonoran Desert is a familiar example of a desert ecosystem and its star species is the saguaro cactus. Create this ecosystem by painting the insides of the box in tan, red and orange for land surfaces and blue, pink or purple for the sky.
Add sand to the bottom of the box, gluing rocks randomly across the landscape. Use craft materials or real cactus plants to create numerous saguaro to place within the ecosystem. Use natural materials to simulate ironwood, mesquite, and palo verde. Then draw prickly pear cacti and grasses.
Finally, print pictures from the Internet or use plastic animals to bring the diorama to life. Gila woodpeckers sheltering in the saguaro, desert tortoises feeding on prickly pear fruit and great-horned owls and cardinals perched in trees.
The Gobi Desert in Asia is an example of a cold, winter desert created by the rain-shadow effect of the Himalayas. Its landscape is mostly bare rock, with only five percent of its area covered by sand.
Create this ecosystem by painting the interior of the box rusty, orange-red for land surfaces and blue and grey for the sky. Next paint some rocks the same color as the landscape and glue them randomly within the box. Vegetation here is sparse, but saxaul trees, wild onions, tamarix shrubs, needle grass and saltwort do occur. Use natural materials or drawings to include these within the ecosystem.
Use pictures from the Internet or plastic animals to represent common species like jerboas and the golden eagles that eat them, using fishing line to hang the birds from the top of the box. Place other animals such as musk ox, ibex, camels, Gobi bear, and snow leopards throughout the box to complete the ecosystem.
Images of the Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world, focus on its dune system, but it also includes mountains, rocky areas, gravel plains and salt flats. Using the dune landscape for this ecosystem can still provide eye-opening details that bring the interdependence of its species to light. Begin by painting the interior of the box tan for land surfaces and blue for the sky.
The dunes do not support extensive plant life, but oases spread throughout the region allow date and daum palms to flourish. Paint an oasis on the horizon. Glue sand to the bottom of the box and use paper bowls to create dunes by gluing sand to the outside and placing them upside down within the box. Fill the spaces between them with sand.
Use natural materials to depict other plants within the diorama including the acacia tree, desert grasses and the African peyote cactus. Use plastic animals or pictures from the Internet to include common species like jerboa, Fennec foxes, camels, vultures and horned vipers.
Few students expect to include a frozen landscape in their desert ecosystem project, but the Arctic Desert consists of several island groups covered in ice, with wide plains giving way to mountains. Vegetation is sparse, but includes mosses, lichens, and low grasses.
Create this ecosystem by painting the interior of the box white for land surfaces and blue for the sky. Glue large, unpainted rocks to the bottom of the box to depict mountains.
Use natural materials to represent vegetation, placing clumps throughout the landscape. Place plastic animals or pictures from the Internet to represent nesting colonies of Atlantic puffin, Arctic terns, and ivory gulls. Include some flying birds in the box by hanging them from the top with fishing line. Include prey species such as Arctic hares and lemmings and their predators, polar bears and Arctic foxes.