Biol 318 Conservation Biology: Lecture Course
This course provides a broad survey of current conservation issues but focusing on solution to these issues that are based on biology, economics, and societal needs, particularly those of indigenous peoples. The objectives of this course are students to: 1) Become an informed citizen, 2) Understand processes and scales that affect biodiversity patterns and dynamics, 3) Get a deeper understanding of the spatial and temporal scales of human actions that cause species endangerment, 4) Get a deeper understanding how societal input influences laws and regulations relating to conservation of biodiversity, 5) Build problem-solving skills to evaluate conservation issues, and 6) Improve critical thinking, and quantitative and communication skills
Biol 404 Human-Wildlife Conflicts in the Anthropocene (co-instructed with Daniel Cristol): Field Course
Florida is full of wildlife and people, and thus there are many species that have become endangered, and others that have adapted and are thriving around people. This course provides an ecological and evolutionary perspective on the question of whether and how animals can adapt to anthropogenic change. After driving to Florida in vans, the class will spend 6 days in the field examining case studies, including 1) the manatee and its trajectory towards human-caused extirpation, 2) exotic tropical forest species thriving in urban areas, 3) Keys wildlife dealing with sea-level rise and automobile collisions, 4) endangered and vulnerable species that appear to have successfully adopted golf courses and residential development, 5) the history and present issues of the Everglades, 6) the remarkable recovery of alligators from legacy DDT pollution and the effects of industrialized agriculture, and 7) the ongoing case of rapid evolution and population recovery of the endangered snail kite (bird) in response to the arrival of a new food source, the giant apple snail, which is quickly eliminating the snail kite’s original sole food source, the native apple snail. To find out more about this course please visit here.
Biol 445/545 GIS for Biologists: Lecture and Lab Course
Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are pivotal tools that biologists increasingly employ to help answer spatial questions. A hallmark of ecology and conservation biology for decades, landscape patterns have been analyzed for species conservation, land management, and environmental assessment. Recent research includes analyses designed to answer specific questions such as the influence of human disturbance and climate on land cover fragmentation. Spatial analyses have also been applied at much smaller extents such as computer tomography assessment of vertebral osteoporosis, assessment of cancerous cell behavior, breast cancer risk assessment in mammographic output, analyses of Transmission Electron Microscopy images in chemistry, and fractal analyses of soil macropores. From natural resources to human welfare, spatial relationships of data have become an exciting frontier for research. The goal of this laboratory-seminar-style course is to give students a well-founded understanding of spatial analytical tools and their broad implementation and limitations. Particularly, students will: 1) Improve their quantitative and informatics skills, 2) Develop an understanding of how spatial analyses can be integrated across various disciplines of biological sciences, 3) Expand their writing, synthesis skills, or presentation skills, and 4) Improve skills to critically evaluate scientific papers.
Biol 458 Conservation Biology Lab: Lab and Field Course
This course has three major objectives: 1) Become familiar with sampling designs to estimate species richness and diversity, 2) Gain insights into how to sample biodiversity in the field, 3) Learn how to estimate biodiversity as wells as density and occupancy of organisms when detection is imperfect. This course is based on lectures, computer labs in R, and field labs to collect data.
Biol 461 Marine Ecology and Conservation (co-instructed with Jonathan Allen): Field Course
This field course will provide students with a first-hand introduction to the ecology and conservation of intertidal and subtidal ecosystems in the San Juan Archipelago of Washington State. The course is centered around a field trip that will be based out of the University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories (FHL) on San Juan Island, WA. San Juan Island is home to a series of extensive biological preserves and marine protected areas that make it uniquely suited as an area for the study of conservation biology. This course builds on an existing course taught Dr. Allen (Marine Ecology Laboratory) and Dr. Leu (Conservation Biology). Dr. Leu's expertise in bird and mammalian biology complements the invertebrate expertise of Dr. Allen, and both are very familiar with the fauna of the San Juan archipelago, making this tandem of instructors especially well qualified to jointly offer this course. For most of the course expect to see Dr. Leu looking to the sky and Dr. Allen looking under rocks, with the sea the common link between them.
Biol 602 Experimental Design (co-instructed with Diane Shakes): Discussion-based course
This course has three goals. First, first semester graduate students will learn to employ a rigorous experimental design when developing their research. Second, graduate students will improve/refresh their statistical/analytical techniques. Third, students will be exposed to best practices and common pitfalls in research design. Research design is the first important step toward successful research. Because the importance of experimental design and analytical tools differ between sub-disciplines in Biology, this course is offered in three distinct sections. All first year students take the first section which will end just after Fall Break and complements Intro to Grad Studies (BIOL601). The first section (1 credit) focuses on experimental design. Topics discussed will cover robust research practices and key approaches in experimental design (replication, sample size, data independence), common designs, and common experimental biases. At the conclusion of this first module, students will discuss in an oral presentation and write-up how they are incorporating best practices of experimental design into one or more aspects of their own research plans. During the second half the semester, students will have option of taking one or both of the second sections (each for 1 credit). Some students will choose to not take this second credit, most will take one or the other, and rare students will take both. One section (Collecting and Analyzing Data) includes a review of statistical inference and focuses on data collection and data analysis. Students will learn how to fit data to distributions, explore data prior to statistical analyses, and perform statistical analyses of common designs. Students will also read and discuss a set of papers published in a special issue of Ecology in 2014, on the use and abuse of P values. The other section (Cell and Molecular Techniques) emphasizes lab techniques that are commonly used in cell and molecular biology studies and which are directly relevant to the particular students enrolled. For each technique, discussions will consider the underlying methodology, best practices and common pitfalls in experimental design, and primary research papers that use that particular technique. Research advisors will be invited to participate in discussions of techniques in their area of special expertise. For example - topics for Fall 2019 were RNA seq, Immunofluorescence, and Conditional Mutants.