EPOB 4800
Understanding environmental problems; making effective use of technical information; of general applicability to environmental problems; aimed at the first party participant.
This course has been designed as a critical thinking course. This means that this course requires you to practice sustained critical thinking and to demonstrate such thinking in both written form and oral discussion. Thus, there will be two aspects to this course. There will be course topics and critical thinking topics. The course topics will focus on models. There will be an overview of models and modeling types: linear vs non-linear models; deterministic vs stochastic models. We will examine differential vs difference equations in modeling, as well as aggregation, chaos and strange attractors. The critical thinking topics will include: the role of modeling in the discipline of ecology; the consequences of non-linear relationships; the assumptions and consequences of equilibrium conditions; and the value of modeling. Students will have the opportunity to develop the following skills: programming, uses of matrix manipulations, sensitivity analysis, error analysis, and numerical estimation procedures. Finally, the student will have the opportunity to survey types of models used to study various ecological subjects.