In lecture we'll introduce ecology through a study of ten topic areas. We'll start off with a welcome to ecology and the course, where we'll introduce a figure that will help drive our discussion.
Modifed from Funk et al 2008, this figure explores how various factors determine what organisms are found at a given location. We'll start off with a focus on the physical environment, exploring what sets global and local patterns in climate. We'll next discuss how these trends are reflected in biomes, or general forms of plant communities, across the earth's surface. This leads naturally to a question of how these plants came to match these areas. We'll answer this question by discussing evolution, and we'll learn that evolution is driven by selection on natural variation in key traits.
Evolution is an excellent example of tradeoffs, and we'll follow this theme in discussing variation in life history strategy and resulting impacts on population dynamics. After focusing on a single population, we'll consider how populations interact in communities. We'll grow the idea of community dynamics to consider changes over time and space in the regional species pool through a study on biogeography. We'll next move on to a lecture focused on ecosystem ecology, which considers how organisms contribute to larger flows of energy and elements in the world, before concluding by considering how ecology can inform conservation and management issues.
Every lecture page has background reading on the topic, lecture slides from Google Slides, and additional media (articles and videos) to enhance your understanding. The complete folder of lecture slides can also be accessed below for easy download, but note these may be updated throughout the semester.