BIOL 571 - Landscape Ecology and Applications

3 units (fi 6)(SECOND, 3-0-3)

Faculty of Science

Landscapes are holistic entities whose patterns influence ecological processes. Topics highlighted in this course include landscape components, morphology and dynamics; detecting spatial/temporal change in landscapes; issues of scales; movements of organisms, disturbances, and nutrients across landscape mosaics; and restoration, planning and management in a landscape context. Labs emphasize GIS applications to characterizing landscape patterns and heterogeneity in space and time, distributing and moving organisms across landscapes, and restoring or planning landscapes for conservation objectives. Lectures and labs are the same as for BIOL 471, but with an additional research project and evaluation appropriate to graduate studies. Prerequisite: consent of instructor. Credit cannot be obtained for both BIOL 471 and 571.