Teaching

Please follow this link to access teaching materials for this course. 

This course is designed to reinforce current methods of research that students have been introduced to in their Principles of Biology course sequence, including the use of biological instrumentation. Students will reinforce their fluency in scientific methodology and transition to their upper-level classes with the skills necessary to both critique and produce sound scientific research

Practicing ecologists need a strong foundation in experimental design and data analysis; these skills allow ecologists to transform an idea or hypothesis into a conclusion. Ecologists who do not perform research also require these skills to critically evaluate a study (is the study likely reliable?), draw meaning from a study’s conclusions, and understand the limits of the conclusions. Starting in the early 2010’s, prominent research demonstrated that results from many studies were not “replicable”; i.e., when scientists tried to re-perform previous research, they obtained different results and conclusions from the original work. This observation raised serious doubt regarding the reliability of scientific findings. This course is a mixture of class discussion of the primary literature and hands-on experience involving data and computing. Completing assigned readings, intellectual engagement with topics, discussion participation, and completion of in-class tutorials are the main ways students will learn in this class. 

A course on how ecological systems change through time and how to forecast how they will change in the future. It combines reading and discussing primary scientific literature with R tutorials on how to work with time-series data and make forecasts in R. It is intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who have started reading the primary scientific literature and have a basic background in R. A link to the teaching materials for this course can be found here.