Landscape Ecology Projects


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General Overview of Class Projects

We would like to give each of you the opportunity to try to identify and decipher spatial patterns in real ecological communities. These sorts of projects can benefit from teamwork in many ways, so the projects will be done in small groups of three students. We have assigned each of you to a specific group, and each group will be randomly assigned a project from the five we have identified. In the process of completing these projects, each of you will become familiar with issues of sampling, scale, and analysis.

We expect that team members will collaborate to decide what questions are most interesting to ask of the assigned system. Your group can then formulate and execute a sampling design and analysis. We (the instructors) will work with you at each step to ensure that your approach is likely to be successful. However, we have never studied these systems and thus, cannot predict the outcome.

Because of the impending climatic changes, we have the following schedule:

  • By Wednesday, 29 Sept, develop questions to be investigated and the types of data to be collected. You must schedule a meeting with us BEFORE commencing data collection
  • Finish data collection NO LATER THAN 15 October (note midterm exam is Wednesday, 13 Oct), and meet with us to discuss how you will organize the analyses
  • Finish analyses by Wednesday, 10 November and meet with us to discuss how you are interpreting it.
  • Give an oral presentation (~20 minutes) on your project (to be scheduled during the last 2 weeks of class)
  • Turn in final paper, Thursday, 9 December