Climate Change Ecology

Catalog description

This course will explore both historic and predicted climate change and the resulting impacts on the ecology of plants and animals. We will begin by developing an understanding of the factors that influence the Earth's climate both globally and regionally and investigate what we currently understand about the impacts of human-induced climate change since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The course will be broken into several sections. The first will be an introduction to the Earth's climate system and climate change. The second investigates the impacts currently being observed in nature. The third section explores historical patterns of climate change impacts on biological systems. We will then use our knowledge to look at how theory and modeling can be used to predict future responses to climate change.