Contact Info
Instructor:Manuel A. Morales
Office: BIOL 215, x2983
E-mail: Manuel.A.Morales@williams.edu
Office Hours: M-W-F 10:00-11:00.
Teaching Assistants: Liz Gleason, Annie O'Sullivan
Course Schedule
Lectures meet M-W-F at 9:00 a.m. in TPL 203 (New Location). Labs meet Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m. Meeting locations vary with labs and will be announced in class.
Course Description
This course combines lectures with field and indoor laboratory exercises to explore factors that determine the distribution and abundance of plants and animals in natural systems. The course begins with a macroperspective and then builds from the population to the ecosystem level. An emphasis is given to basic ecological principles and relates them to current environmental issues. Selected topics include population dynamics (competition, predation, mutalism); community interactions (succession, food chains and diversity) and ecosystem function (biogeochemical cycles, energy flow).
Format: lecture/laboratory, six hours a week.
Course Objectives
In addition to providing an understanding of basic ecological principles, this course will help you to:
- Develop and test scientific hypotheses.
- Read and interpret primary scientific literature.
- Use quantitative techniques to address uncertainty in data.
- Develop a conceptual framework for interpreting complex systems.
- Generalize natural history phenomena.
Text and Readings
The textbook for the course is Townsend, Harper and Begon's " Essentials of Ecology". The course will also rely on readings from the primary literature. Where possible, supplementary readings will be made available through this website.
Grading
Evaluation will be based on: hour exam I (20%), hour exam II (20%), final exam (20%), and lab assignments (40%). Problem sets will be corrected but not graded.
QFR
Ecology is the science of interpreting the distribution and abundance of organisms. Its challenge is to make tractable the complexity of the natural world. To this end, ecologists rely on a variety of quantitative and formal reasoning skills - statistics are used to infer patterns in nature while theory is used to generate predictions. Often, these approaches are combined to address applied problems, as in the application of population dynamic models to fisheries management. In this class, QFR skills will be reinforced with problem sets and lab exercises.
Honor Code
The honor code as laid out in the Student Handbook applies to all work in this course. In addition, the following conditions apply. I encourage you to work collaboratively on aspects of lab writeups and worksheets including data collection, analysis, and interpretation. However, each person is responsible for writing their own reports and completing their own worksheets. Problem sets are not graded, and you should feel free to work on these
collaboratively.
