Ecology and Evolution of City Life

Catalog description

This course explores the ecology and evolution of life in cities and looks at the transformative role it can play in shaping and managing urban environments. The conversion of natural land to human settlements is a process that is accelerating across the world, and over half of the human population now lives in urbanized areas. But how much do we as humans understand about how life responds to the cities we create? It turns out, not as much as we should, as ecologists and evolutionary biologists historically focused on the natural environment rather than the 'built environment'. But the last two decades have witnessed a revolution in this area, integrating the principles of ecology and evolution of the natural environment into the built environment. In this course, we take advantage of this momentum to focus on the processes determining patterns of abundance and distribution of organisms in urban ecosystems, the interactions among organisms in the urban environment, the interactions between humans (and societies) and nature in urban environments, and some aspects of urban planning as it relates to ecology, evolution and the environment. Traditional lectures will be accompanied by discussions of primary literature articles. Grades will be based on presentations of literature articles, participation in discussions, and a final paper on student-selected topics in urban ecology and evolution. This course satisfies the requirements for a Disciplinary Communication course. This course satisfies the Population Biology/Ecology breadth requirement of the B.A. and B.S. in Biology. Offered as BIOL 313 and BIOL 413 . Counts as a Disciplinary Communication course. Prereq: Graduate Student status.