EEB 3534-5534 Lectures 1:00 - 2:15 pm, M W 3 credits
A lecture, discussion and computer laboratory course with field trips to Cedar Creek and the Bell Museum
Instructors: Prof. Jeannine Cavender-Bares, cavender@umn.edu Dr. Jesús Pinto-Ledezma, jpintole@umn.edu
Biodiversity science is a rapidly expanding field of enquiry with increasing digital resources and global monitoring capabilities precisely at the moment in history that scientists recognize as the Sixth Extinction. In other words, we are currently facing a biodiversity crisis with threats to the Earth’s biota not seen since the dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago. “Biodiversity” was coined by W.G. Rosen and E.O Wilson in the 1980s to describe the variation in all of life on Earth. The term is now widely used in both the scientific and popular literature and is at the center of scientific enquiry, conservation efforts, large-scale collaborative pursuits of technological advances to allow monitoring from space, and global assessments that interface with international policy. Biodiversity science requires integration across multiple disciplines from evolution, to ecology, remote sensing, conservation biology, economics and the social sciences, including the environmental policy. Biodiversity science is thus inherently interdisciplinary. As a consequence, rarely does a single course provide students the opportunity to focus on this critical topic from multiple perspectives and dimensions.
This new course seeks to provide students intensive study of biodiversity from six perspectives: 1) the origins of biodiversity, including the processes of speciation and extinction over macroevolutionary timescales and those involved in generating biological variation at microevolutionary scales; 2) the ecological problem of species coexistence, given the nature of competitive interactions and biological filters with a focus on the interactions of individual species and major threats to biodiversity; 3) the consequences of biodiversity and biodiversity loss for ecosystem functions, focusing on ecosystem scale processes; 4) the services or benefits to humans attributed to biodiversity, including cultural benefits of biodiversity; here we discuss both practical and ethical arguments for sustaining biodiversity; 5) methods of detecting biodiversity including classic field biodiversity observations and taxonomic collections and emerging remote sensing methods that harness hyperspectral data and satellite imagery; and 6) scientific assessments of biodiversity that communicate the science of biodiversity to policymakers, particularly the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The IPBES involves scientists from around the world and integrates indigenous and local knowledge (ILK). The United Nations and governments around the globe are sponsoring the IPBES, building on earlier assessments such as a prominent one in the UK.
Several guest lecturers from across the University will participate in discussions and aid in development of computer labs (including Sharon Jansa (CBS), Keith Barker (CBS), Joe Knight (CFANS), and others).
The course is designed to achieve five learning outcomes. 1) Students learn about the fundamental scientific principles involved in the origins, maintenance and consequences of biodiversity, which span ecology and evolution. 2) Students learn to analyze data sets to address critical questions about the nature of and threats to biodiversity. 3) Students view up close the approaches that ecologists (at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve) and evolutionary biologists (at the Bell Museum) use to examine different dimensions of biodiversity. 4) Students engage in discussion of the major scientific, applied and ethical issues facing biodiversity. In doing so, they learn to advance logical arguments and provide support for them. 5) Students develop and present a collaborative project that addresses a fundamental concern in biodiversity science. Projects develop a focal question or set of questions, harness and analyze data using statistical or modeling exercises learned in to computer labs to test hypotheses and address the focal questions, and review relevant primary literature. Projects can pertain to all six perspectives in the course or focus on a subset or a single one. The combination of lectures, hands on problem solving and analysis, discussion and active learning activities, engagement with real scientific experiments and collections, presentations, and collaborative project development fosters learning across the spectrum of learning styles.