Courses

Forest Health (NR782/882)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2021

Forests cover over 30% of the land surface of the Earth and are incredibly important ecologically and economically, as well as to the health of the planet.  While forests show great capacity to withstand even major disturbances, these ecosystems are increasingly threatened worldwide by climate change, native and introduced insects and disease, poor management practices, land clearing, drought, fire, and pollution.  This course offers an overview of the dominant threats and their causes and consequences.  Particular focus is directed toward methods of...

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Forest Entomology (NR 506)

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2021

Insects are incredibly important to the structure and function of forests.  This course focuses on the biology, taxonomy and identification of forest insects, approached from both an applied and basic (evolutionary) perspective.  Odd years only.

NR 965 - Community Ecology

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2021
This graduate-level course investigates how community properties -- species richness, and abundance distribution -- are influenced by evolutionary history, by landscape phenomena such as dispersal and migration, and by local factors such as the physical environment, disturbance, competition, predation, and mutualism. Mechanistic models of community dynamics, including succession, are discussed. The influence of species diversity on ecosystem function is discussed, and all aspects of the course are related to conservation science. Odd years only.

Hot Topics: Applied Evolution in Managed Systems (NR 993)

Semester: 

Spring

Offered: 

2019

Human efforts to manage populations or ecosystems are often met with evolutionary changes that emerge as a direct response to selective forces that we impose. Examples include the evolution of antibiotic, chemical, or defense gene resistance, changes in virulence of human or agricultural pests or pathogens, altered life history attributes of harvested and/or weedy populations, and many more. Strategies for local and landscape scale management of evolutionary trajectories as well as more direct manipulation of evolutionary processes are becoming...

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