Spring 2010: Conservation Biology (BIO 415/615), TTh 12:30-1:50, 214 LSC

Syllabus (2009)
Course website (password protected)
Synopsis: This course focuses on the biological attributes of populations and communities relevant to their conservation.  Secondarily, this course covers a selection of statistical issues that are increasingly integrated into the ecologist's toolkit.  This is not a course in inferential statistics, and you are not required to have a strong mathematical background (although it wouldn't hurt).  However, by the end of the course you'll appreciate the integral role that data, models, and analysis play in modern conservation.  More specifically, the objectives of this course are to: (1) Understand the conceptual underpinnings of conservation biology (population biology, community ecology, biogeography, landscape ecology); (2) Understand the science behind the need for conservation (habitat loss, pollution, invasive species, climate change); (3) Be able to identify when management decisions are based on sound science — good data, appropriate models, quantified uncertainty—and when they're not; and (4) Become a sophisticated reader of the scientific literature.

Spring 2010: Plant Ecology: Niche Modeling (BIO 793), TBA

Synopsis: Describing the environmental and biotic factors that constrain species distributions across space and time is a common objective in environmental sciences, but keeping up with rapid advances in statistical techniques and the increasing availability of geospatial data is a daunting challenge. In this graduate seminar, our objective will be to construct a niche model for a focal organism by combining available species and environmental datasets in a hierarchical Bayesian framework. We will start from first principles, and students will be introduced to 1) the basics of programming in the open-source R statistical language; 2) statistical approaches based on maximum likelihood and hierarchical Bayes; and 3) interfacing with other open source statistical tools through R (such as WinBUGS). The second phase of the seminar will involve a case study of a selected focal species and how its biology can be related to environmental factors in a statistical framework. One candidate is red spruce (Picea rubens), a species well represented in several available vegetation databases (USFS Forest Inventory Analysis, Great Smoky Mountains NP vegetation database, Adirondacks plot data, etc.) and one which poses several interesting niche-related questions (biotic vs. abiotically-determined southern/northern limits, global change influences, role of microtopography, etc). A final component will be to construct a hierarchical niche model for the focal species that addresses a compelling aspect of the species' biology (e.g., response to climate or land use change). Pending time and student interest, we may also include a more explicit GIS component, such as how to obtain and extract available geospatial data (topographic, climatic, hydrologic, land use, soils data) and interface with GIS data via R using open-source GRASS GIS; we may also cover other modern niche modeling techniques (MaxEnt, CART/Random Forests). Although our case study will be shared, students will be encouraged to develop these techniques for their own datasets as time permits in class.

Fall 2009: Population Biology (BIO 345)

Synopsis: A broad survey course designed as an introduction to the topic of population biology. The lectures will cover evolution, phylogenetics, animal behavior, population ecology, community ecology and ecosystems. Population Biology is part of one sequence within the required core curriculum of the Biology Department.