Course Description:
Cedar Creek is one of the most active and influential ecological research sites on Earth. It contains an exceptional diversity of plants and animals, partly because it is at the meeting point of three of the largest biomes in North America: the northern boreal forest, the eastern deciduous forest, and the Great Plains grasslands and savannas. In this course, you will visit current experiments, including studies that test how biodiversity loss affects ecosystems and whether climate change will speed up or slow down, work with data from ongoing studies, and collaborate with other students to develop your own field ecology group project.The goals of the course are to improve your understanding of: 1.biological population dynamics, community diversity, and ecosystem functioning;2.theoretical, experimental, and observational approaches used in ecology; and3.influences and dependences of humans on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.Specifically, this course aims to improve your understanding of: population ecology and pairwise species interactions, including population growth, metapopulation dynamics, disease dynamics, competition, predation, and mutualisms and facilitation; community ecology, including resource competition and tradeoffs promoting coexistence, food webs and indirect interactions, island biogeography, measures and patterns of biodiversity, contemporary changes in biodiversity, biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and biodiversity and ecosystem stability; and ecosystem and global change ecology, including energy flows, nutrient cycling, habitat degradation and restoration, climate change, eutrophication, biological invasions, and ecosystem services.

Web Address of Course Info:
https://cbs.umn.edu/isbell-biodiversity-lab/teaching