Community Ecology - odd Spring Semesters
<>Dr. Michael Marchetti
PLEASE
NOTE: this is only a sample syllabi, as a result, dates and
specific readings will likely be different each year
898-5641O, 966-0647C, mmarchetti@csuchico.edu web site: http://www.csuchico.edu/~sacperch/ Office
Hours TBA
The systematic study of communities is an
amazingly diverse
and fascinating branch of ecology, but it is not an easy subject to
study.
There are not simple answers and few undisputed tenants in this field. But, (don’t despair) this makes it an
exciting enterprise to tackle. The
boundaries of community ecology are fuzzy, its language is flexible and
dynamic, and its practice is not often standardized.
Yet this is what we will be spending the next
14 weeks wrestling with. You will not come
away from this class with a prescription for how to do community
ecology;
instead you will leave with an appreciation of the complexity and
dynamic
nature of this growing and important branch of ecology.
For this class it is helpful if you have taken
general ecology, and an introductory
statistics class; see me if you have not.
Class Structure - The class will meet for
three hours once a week and have the
following learning objectives:
-
students will demonstrate intellectual
synthesis and
interpretation of topics found in the chapters of “Community Ecology”
by Peter
Morin (1999 Blackwell Science) through written discussion questions.
-
students will present two 25min powerpoint
presentations and lead a short discussion on a community ecology topic
-
students will participate in a group
discussions of
current and classic primary literature in community ecology
-
students will synthesize and communicate
their current
understanding of topics in community ecology through two written papers
-
students will learn to evaluate
presentations and
provide appropriate feedback on presentation construction and
content.
Students in the class will be graded in 4 areas:
1. Two
lecture/discussions to the class on topics in Morin’s book (more below)
2. Two
short (1200-1500 word) research papers (more below)
3. Class
participation
4.
Attendance (can only miss 2 classes before you do not pass)
Nuts and Bolts:
I. Student participation is mandatory
This is
a upper division level class; therefore students must attend
and participate
in every class meeting. If you miss or
skip 2 class meetings, you will receive an incomplete grade for the
course, if
you miss more than two class meetings you will fail If you can’t
meet this
restriction, PLEASE see me as soon as possible.
Students
are expected to read the assignments prior to class and come prepared
to engage
in lively and spirited discussion of the material.
This means that you must read the weekly
chapter in Morin (1999) and the assigned discussion paper(s) for the
week. (see
below). To encourage this behavior I
will ask you to produce 3 questions/discussion points from each of the
assigned
primary literature reading each week and have them ready to turn in to
me.
II. Student Lecture/Discussion of Chapter Topics
The presentation/lectures
are intended to accomplish a number of things.
A.
give
students a chance to delve deeply into a particular subject area and
become
very familiar with the material
B.
provide
a guided tutorial to the rest of the students in the class (you don’t
know a
subject until you have to clearly explain it to others)
C.
provide
students with a chance to enhance their presentation, organization and
public
speaking skills through peer evaluation
D.
provide
points for discussion by the class
In order
to meet these goals the presentations will not be a laundry-list of
facts from
the papers you read or a recitation of the main points of the chapter. Instead, students are encouraged to dig into
a topic and present a lecture/discussion that enlightens rather than
recites
the material. This means you will
have to do more work than just reading one or two papers on a subject. Additional readings for each chapter are
provided on the schedule may be a place to start.
A host of others can be found in the
references within each chapter and from the J-STOR search engine or
from Google
Scholar. It's your job to seek them
out. If you need suggestions come talk
to me.
Upper
division classes are categorically different from lower division
classes; they
require more work, thought and synthesis.
It follows that the presentations in this class will be of a
higher
character also. I want to see that you
can think and wrestle and reason with the ideas. [Are
they reasonable? What are the limitations
of this line of
thought? Is this only for select taxa or
situations? How does this compare or
contrast with other ideas?] This is what I expect the presentations to
do,
indicate to me and your peers that you can take a subject, wrestle with
it,
take ownership of it and make it intelligible to the class.
The
presentations should be 20-25 min long with time for discussion and
questions
afterward and they will be evaluated by me and informally by the
students in
the class. Each student will evaluate
the presentations based on the following areas: 1.
Organization/Clarity, 2.
Familiarity with material, and 3. Style.
This means that you must all read the Morin (1999) chapter prior
to
class in order to intelligently evaluate the other student's
presentations
effectively. The students will make
constructive written comments to the presenter, designed to help them
improve
their presentations. These will be
turned in to me at the end of class and I will distribute them to the
presenter
at the next meeting. A presentation
grade based my comments and loosely informed by student comments will
be
assigned for each presenter.
III. Student papers
Again,
this is an upper level course and therefore the quality and scope of
the work
will be different from a lower division class.
Papers will present a synthesis of a topic.
They must show original and intelligent
thought. Papers will not be a book
report on a subject. I want to know
what/how you think about a particular topic rather than what others
think. You need to use references to back
up your
points. This requires that you read the
primary literature widely and then take that body of knowledge and
create
synthetic arguments/observations from the material.
This is very different from what you are
used to and it is sometimes difficult and time consuming. Papers are also expected to be well written
and composed. I do not want to spend
my
time correcting syntax, spelling and grammar errors.
The
first paper will be on a topic/question that I distribute within the
first four
weeks of class. A draft can be turned in
within a week, the final paper will be due three weeks from when it’s
handed
out. The text should be no more than
1500 words (about 6 double spaced pages).
The bibliography, figures, tables etc. are additional and may be
as long
as you choose. The question(s) will be
open-ended enough to encourage creativity.
Drafts will be treated as a working document and receive no
penalty. Final papers will be graded on
Organization,
Clarity, Content, Thought and Style.
The second
paper (same length) will be due on the day scheduled for final exams
and may be
on any topic related to community ecology that you find interesting or
you can
choose to answer your choice of questions I had out.
You must submit your own topic for me to
approve two weeks prior to the end of class.
IV Weekly Discussion
Each
week one or more papers will be assigned reading (see schedule). These need to be read prior to class. Students will come prepared with a list of
questions or topics for discussion related to the paper(s). Note that some of the papers for discussion
are longer than others. This cannot be
helped, it is the nature of the beast, some authors tend to write
longer
papers, others are pithier.
V. Grades
Grades
will be determined based on the 5-P formula:
Presentation
1 100
Presentation
2 100
Paper 1
100
Paper 2
100
Participation
100
(should
be easy to get if you come to class and participate)
Total
500
If you get >95% of the points = A, 90-94%=A-, 85-89%=B+,
80-84%=B, 75-79%=C+, 70-74%=C
65-69% = C-, 60-64% = D, <60% = F.
Tentative Schedule and Readings for
class
discussions. (Bold
title are mandatory readings, others are suggested)
PLEASE NOTE: the
exact dates and weekly readings are very likely different every
year. please refer to the syllabus you received in class
Week 1. Introduction
Introduction
and Discussion Assignments
Week 2. - Communities & Succession (Morin chap 1
& 13)
Lecture:
Three ways of doing science
o
Clements, F.E. 1936. Nature and
structure of
the climax, Ecology 24:252-84.
o
Gleason H.A. 1926. The
individualistic
concept of plant association. Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club.
53: 7-26.
Week 3. Competition: Mechanisms, Models and Niches (Morin
chap 2)
Lecture:
Character displacement & Competition models
o
Schoener
T.W. 1982. The controversy over interspecific competition. American
Scientist,
70: 586-596
o
MacArthur
R.H. 1958. Population ecology of some warblers of northeastern
coniferous
forests. Ecology 39:599-619.
o
Tilman
D. 1977. Resource competition between planktonic algae: an experimental
and
theoretical approach. Ecology 58:338-348.
o
Hardin. G. 1960. The
competitive exclusion
principle. Science 131:1292-1297.
Week 4. Competition: experiments, observations and null
models (Morin chap 3)
Lecture:
Competition field experiments and Sac perch competition
o
Schoener
T.W. 1983. Field experiments on interspecific competition. Am. Nat.
122:240-285.
o
Connell J.H. 1983. On the prevalence
and
relative importance of interspecific competition: evidence from field
esperiments. Am. Nat. 122:661-696
o
Hariston N.G. 1980. The
experimental test
of an analysis of field distributions: competition in terrestrial
salamanders.
Ecology 61: 817-826.
o
Heske E.J., J.H
Brown, & S. Mistry. 1994.
Long-term experimental study of a Chihuahuan desert rodent community:
13 years
of competition. Ecology 75:438-445.
Week 5. Predation and Communities: Empirical Patterns
(Morin chap 4)
Lecture:
Intro to stats (regression, ANOVA, ANCOVA, Principal Components etc.)
o
Brooks
J.L. & S.I Dodson. 1965. Predation, body size and composition of
plankton.
Science 150:28-35.
o
Harriston N.G., F.E. Smith, &
L.B.
Slobodkin. 1960. Community structure, population control and
competition. Am.
Nat. 94:421-425.
o
Ehrlich
P.R. & L.C. Birch. 1967. The “balance of nature” and “population
control”
Am. Nat. 101:97-107.
o
Slobodkin, L.B., F.E.
Smith, & N.G.
Hariston. 1967. Regulation in terrestrial ecosystems and the implied
balance of
nature. Am. Nat. 101:109-124.
Week 6. Simple Models of Predation (Morin chap 5)
Lecture:
Predation models
o
Pyke, G. H. 1984.
Optimal foraging
theory: a critical review. Annual Review of Ecology and
Systematics 15:
523-575.
o
Krebs C.J et al. 1995. Impact of
food and
predation on the snowshoe hare cycle. Science 269:1112-1115.
o
N.C. Stenseth 1995. Snowshoe hare
populations: squeezed from below and above Science 269: 1061
o
O'Donoghue
M. & C.J. Krebs, 1992. Effects of supplemental food on snowshoe
hare reproduction and juvenile growth
at a cyclic population peak. J. Anim. Ecol. 61:631
Week 7. Food Webs (Morin chap 6)
Lecture:
Food webs and isotopes
o
Lindeman
R.L. 1942. The trophic-dynamic aspect of ecology. Ecology 23:399-418.
o
Paine.
R.T. 1988. Food webs: road maps of interactions or grist for
theoretical
development. Ecology 69:1648-1654.
o
Polis
G.A. 1991. Compex desert food webs: and empirical critique of food web
theory.
Am. Nat. 138:123-155.
o
Polis
G.A. 1998 Stability is woven by complex foodwebs. Nature, 395:744-745.
Week 8. Mutualisms (Morin chap 7)
Lecture:
Simple models of mutualisms
o
Schwartz
M.W. & J.D. Hoeksema 1998. Specialization and resource trade:
biological
markets as a model of mutualisms. Ecology 79:1029-1038.
o
Bronstein
J.L. 1994. Our current understanding of mutualism. Quarterly Review of
Biology.
69:31-51.
o
Wolin
C.L. 1985. The population dynamics of mutualistic systems. Pp. 248-269
in D.H.
Boucher (ed.), The Biology of Mutualism. Oxford University
Press.
Week 9. Indirect Effects (Morin chap 8)
Lecture:
Island Biogeography Theory
o
Levine
J.M. 1999. Indirect facilitation: evidence and predictions from a
riparian
community. Ecology. 80:1762-1769.
o
Strauss
S.Y. 1991. Indirect effects in community ecology: their definition
study and
importance. TREE. 6:206-210.
o
Fortin, D; Beyer, HL;
Boyce, MS; Smith, DW;
Duchesne, T; Mao, JS. 2005. Wolves
influence elk movements: Behavior shapes a trophic cascade in Yellowstone National Park.
Ecology 86(5):1320-1330.
o
Power M.E.
et al. 1985. Grazing
minnows, piscivorous bass, and stream algae: dynamics of a strong
interaction.
Ecology. 66:1448-1456.
Week 10. Temporal Patterns in Communities (Morin chap 9)
Lecture:
What is assembly theory?
o
Drake
J.A. 1990. Communities as assembled structures: do rules govern
pattern? TREE
5(5):159-164
o
Bastow-Wilson
J. & R.J. Whittaker. 1995. Assembly rules demonstrated in a
saltmarsh
community. Journal of Ecology. 85:801-807.
o
Morin P.J. 1984. Odonate guild
composition:
experiments with colonization history and fish predation.
Ecology 65:1866-1873.
o
Price, J. E. & P. J. Morin,
2004,
Colonization history determines alternate community states
in a food web of intraguild
predators. Ecology. 85(4):1017-1028
Week 11. Habitat Selection (Morin chap 10) &
Succession (Morin chap 13)
Lecture
: Meta-analysis, and ecosystem management?
o
Grosberg
R. 1981. Competitive ability influences habitat choice in marine
invertebrates.
Nature 290:700-702.
o
Sih
A.1982. Foraging strategies and the avoidance of predation by an
aquatic insect,
Notonecta hoffmanni. Ecology 63:786-796.
o
Munday, P. L. 2004.
Competitive coexistance
of coral-dwelling fishes: the lottery hypotheis revisited.
Ecology. 85(3):623-628
o
Christensen
N. L. et al. 1996. The report of the ecological society of America
committee on the scientific
basis for ecosystem management. Ecological Applications 6(3):665-691.
Week 12 Experiments in Ecology (NO MORIN CHAPTER)
Lecture:
What is and is not pseudoreplication
o
Diamond J. 1986. Overview:
Laboratory
experiments, field experiments and natural experiments. In
Community Ecology. J.Diamond and T.J.Case (eds.)
Harper and Rowe. NY
o
Roush W. 1995. When rigor meets
reality.
Science. 269:313-315
o
Heffner, R.A., M. J. Butler, &
C. K. Reilly.
1996. Pseudoreplication revisited. Ecology. 77(8):2558-2562.
o
Hurlbert,
S.H. 1984. Pseudoreplication and the design of ecological field
experiments.
Ecological Monographs 54:187-211.
o
Oksanen,
L. 2001. Logic of experiments in
ecology: is pseudoreplication a pseudoissue? Oikos 94:27-38.
o
Schindler
D.W. 1998. Replication versus realism: the need for ecosystem-scale
experiments. Ecosystems 1:323-334.
Week 13. Spatial Ecology & Biogeography (Morin chap.
11)
Lecture:
A brief history of metapopulations
o
Huffaker
C.B. 1958. Experimental studies on predation: dispersion factors and
predator-prey oscillations. Hilgardia 27:343-383.
o
Holyoak
M. & S.P. Lawler 1996. Persistence of an extinction-prone
predator-prey
interaction through metapopulation dynamics. Ecology 77:1867-1879.
o
M.
A. Leibold, M. Holyoak, N. Mouquet, P. Amarasekare, J. M. Chase, M. F.
Hoopes,
R. D. Holt, J. B. Shurin, R. Law, D. Tilman, M. Loreau, A. Gonzalez
(2004) The
metacommunity concept: a framework for multi-scale community ecology
Ecology
Letters 7 (7), 601–613.
Week 14. Species Diversity and Conservation (Morin chap
12)
Lecture:
What is Biodiversity and why should we care?
o
Lyons K. G.
et al. 2005. Rare
species and Ecosystem functioning.
Conservation Biology. 19(4):1019-1024.
o
Hector A. et al. 1999. Plant
diversity, and
productivity experiments in European grasslands. Science
286:1123-1127.
o
McGrady-Steed
J. et al. 1997. Biodiversity regulates ecosystem predictability. Nature
390:162-165.
o
Mills,
L. S., M. E. Soule, and D. F. Doak, 1993. The keystone-species concept
in
ecology and conservation. Bioscience. 43(4):219-224.
Week 15. Applied Community Ecology and Restoration -Is
any of this useful? (NO MORIN CHAPTER)
No
lecture
o
Jones C.G. et al. 1998. Chain
reactions
linking acorns to gypsy moth outbreaks and Lyme disease risk. Science
279:1023-1026.
o
Young,
T. P. 2000. Restoration ecology and conservation biology. Biological
Conservation 92:73-83.
o
Shea, K.
and P. Chesson. 2002. Community ecology theory as a framework for
biological
invasions. TREE 17(4): 170-176.
o
Davis, M.
A., J. P. Grime, and K. Thompson.
2000. Fluctuating resources in plant communities: a general theory of
invasibility. Journal of Ecology 88:528-534.