Environmental Biology and Ecology

Catalog description

Profound changes are affecting our environment, including climate change, habitat loss, pollution, and invasive species. Understanding ecosystems and their inhabitants and functions is critical to engineering a sustainable future for humans. This course is an introduction to ecology and biology for environmental engineers. Ecology topics include the relationships among organisms and between organisms and their environment; and adaptations, populations, communities, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Biology subjects will focus on microbiology, as bacteria are an analog for more-complex species. Microbiology topics include biological molecules, biochemical reactions, energetics, diversity of microbial metabolism, physiology, biofilms, biogeochemical cycles, and the degradation of pollutants. Prerequisite: 03-121