Schedule
Mon-Wed, 3:30 PM - 4:50 PM (8/19/2024 - 12/13/2024) Location: MAIN WTLAB 109
Fri, 11:00 AM - 12:20 PM (8/19/2024 - 12/13/2024) Location: MAIN WTLAB 109
Description
This course seeks to provide students with a basic understanding of ecology and its importance. The course will thus provide a basic synthesis of how individual organisms interact with their physical environment, and with each other, to generate the complex ecosystems we see around us. The unifying theme of the course is biodiversity-its patterns, causes, and the growing worldwide threats to it. Basic ecological principles will be presented using clearly described examples from the current ecological literature. Examples have been chosen carefully to represent as wide a range of ecosystems (terrestrial and aquatic, northern and southern hemisphere) and life forms (animal, plant and microbe) as possible. Particular attention is paid to consequences of global change on organisms, populations, ecological communities and ecosystems. The expected outcome is the presentation of a persuasive picture of how the Earth's natural systems function, and how that functioning may change over the comi