Principles of Ecology

What you'll learn

• Define ecology as the study of the interactions that determine distribution and abundance, distinguish its levels of organization from individual to biosphere, and design replicated, randomized field studies that avoid pseudoreplication.
• Explain how uneven solar heating, atmospheric circulation, oceans, mountains and elevation produce global climate patterns, place biomes on a Whittaker diagram, and describe the EPA's Level I to IV ecoregions and their harmonization with Canadian ecozones.
• Apply tolerance ranges, the law of the minimum, Q10 and thermal performance curves to organisms, and explain heat and water balance in ectotherms, endotherms and plants, including Bergmann's and Allen's rules.
• Model exponential, logistic and discrete-time population growth, calculate doubling times and maximum sustainable yield, and explain density dependence, time lags, chaos, stochasticity and Allee effects.
• Construct and interpret life tables, calculate R₀, generation time and r, project populations with Leslie and stage matrices, interpret λ, stable distributions and elasticities, and explain life history trade-offs along the fast–slow continuum.
• Test quadrat data for random, clumped and uniform dispersion, analyze dispersal kernels, apply the Levins metapopulation model, and explain source–sink dynamics, ecological traps, fragmentation and connectivity.
• Use the Lotka–Volterra competition model and its isoclines to predict competitive outcomes, explain competitive exclusion, fundamental and realized niches, resource partitioning, character displacement, R* theory and apparent competition.
• Analyze predator–prey models and Holling functional responses, explain the snowshoe hare cycle and prey and plant defenses, and model wildlife disease with an SIR framework, including chronic wasting disease.
• Describe major mutualisms and facilitation, quantify communities with richness, diversity, rarefaction, similarity indices and food web connectance, and explain keystone species, trophic cascades and the debate over Yellowstone wolves.
• Explain primary and secondary succession and the facilitation, tolerance and inhibition models, model succession with Markov chains, analyze fire regimes and serotiny, and apply the equilibrium theory of island biogeography.
• Calculate primary production, trophic transfer efficiency and decomposition rates, trace the carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, and explain eutrophication using the Experimental Lakes Area and Lake Erie.
• Analyze the ecological effects of climate change, changing fire regimes, invasive species and fragmentation in North America, interpret trends in ecological data critically, and describe how tribal natural resource programs, cultural burning and co-management apply two-eyed seeing in the United States.