The Plants and Animals of College Hill

Catalog description

This course explores the natural history of organisms living in our own urban environment with a mix of lecture, readings, classroom study of organisms, and close to weekly outside explorations of College Hill, where we will identify species, study their behavior and explore the ecological basis for their survival. The course will explore how these urban-dwelling species provide benefits for our own health and wellbeing, some of the inequities that people have in access to biodiverse green spaces within urban areas, and the role that cities can play in species conservation. Students will gain basic species-identification and observation skills, utilize and add to existing online, citizen-science databases that record species occurrences, and conduct a small term project that explores the diversity or behavior of a specific taxonomic group or organism at a study site of their choosing on College Hill.