BIOL 350 - Ecology

Units: 4
An examination of the factors influencing the relationships between organisms and the living and non-living aspects of their environment. Issues explored include species interactions, population dynamics, physiological adaptations, population growth, community structure, energy flow, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity loss. Lecture Units: 3; Lab Units: 1

Prerequisites: MATH 115, STAT 303, and either BIOL 140B or ENSC 241.

Possible Instructional Methods: Entirely On-ground.
Grading: A-F grading only.
Course Typically Offered: Fall & Spring

Student Learning Outcomes - Upon successful completion of this course students will be able to:

demonstrate knowledge of the important ecological principles that operate at the levels of the individual organism, the population, the community, and the ecosystem discuss various ways in which individuals behaviorally and physiologically interact with their environment;
describe how organisms’ interactions with their environment and other organisms give rise to patterns in their abundance and distribution describe the nature of different interactions between organisms including predator-prey, herbivore plant/algae, competitor-competitor, mutualistic, and parasite-host relationships;
discuss models for population growth and describe factors that influence this population-level phenomenon including density, dispersal, colonization and extinction, death from disease and other factors, predator-prey interactions, and competition;
discuss factors that affect community-level distribution through time and within a given space including succession, biodiversity, disturbance, primary and secondary production, secondary and nutrient cycles;
define biodiversity and its subcomponents, calculate the biodiversity of different communities and elaborate on the factors that influence increases and decreases of the various biodiversity subcomponents at both small and large scales;
discuss the impact that human populations have had on the environment (ecosystem health and sustainability) organize and statistically analyze data sets, create figures with legends and captions to describe data collected during experimental studies use models to visualize and analyze simple data sets and explore the dynamics of ecological processes.