Teaching

I co-teach BIOL 267 with Jim Clark every fall. This graduate level course addresses the fundamental question: Why do we observe the diversity of organisms, how did it get there, and what maintains that diversity? These questions lead us to analyze how organisms interact within populations, how populations interact in communities, and how those interactions are regulated by the physical environment. Understanding the controls on populations is critical for developing sustainable harvest strategies, for anticipating exotic invasions, for biological control of pest species, for managing rare and endangered species and their habitats, and for preserving biodiversity in the face of rapid global change. In this course we examine the "state-of-the-art", including goals of biodiversity science, how those goals are approached, what we have learned, and how they are applied in management and conservation. We see many examples where poor understanding of science stands in the way of progress on pressing environmental problems. The course will consist of lecture meetings and a lab section that will be used for field trips.

I am currently developing BIOL 204 as a course for senior undergraduates and will offer it for the first time in the spring semester of 2009 (subsequently offered in alternate springs). The course will cover topics in ecosystem, community, and physiological ecology of temperate plants and animals through hands-on experimentation. We will address questions of how biological processes are affected by biotic interactions. Theory and methods are reviewed through discussions, while hypothesis formulation, experimental design, data acquisition and processing, and data analysis are learned through field investigation. The course includes several field trips, including two weekends.

BIOL 116 is the one of the core courses of the Biology undergraduate major and covers fundamental principles of ecology and evolutionary biology including: Interaction between biotic and abiotic forces in shaping the dynamics of ecological systems, and how those dynamics are influenced by human activities; mechanisms of evolutionary change as an interplay between ecology and genetics; and evidence for, and consequences of, evolutionary change on both human and geological time scales.

BIOL 267 co-professor Jim Clark demonstrates canopy measurement at Coweeta LTER.