BIOL 302
Communities and Ecosystems
Last Offered Fall 2019
Division III Quantitative/Formal Reasoning
Cross-listed ENVI 312
This course is not offered in the current catalog

An advanced ecology course that examines how species interact with each other and their environment and how communities are assembled. This course emphasizes phenomena that emerge in complex ecological systems, building on the fundamental concepts of population biology, community ecology, and ecosystem science. This foundation will be used to understand specific topics relevant to conservation including invasibility and the functional significance of diversity for ecosystem stability and processes. Lectures and labs will explore how to characterize the emergent properties of communities and ecosystems, and how theoretical, comparative, and experimental approaches are used to understand their structure and function. The lab component of this course will emphasize hypothesis-oriented field experiments as well as “big-data” analyses using existing data sets.The laboratory component of the course will culminate with a self-designed independent or group project.