Wildlife Ecology and Management
EFB 390: Fall 2026
Course Materials
This page mainly contains lectures, sometimes assignments and other resources, and will expand as the semester progresses. Assignments, discussion boards and announcements are on the Blackboard site. Archived materials from 2025 are here
Instructor: Dr. Elie Gurarie, Illick 206
Office hours: Thursday 3:30-4:30 - Illick 206 - or by appointment,
Co-instructors:
- Seanna Jobe
- email: sjobe@esf.edu
- Office Hours: TBD or by appointment
- Dani Verlen
- email: dverlen@esf.edu
- Office Hours: TBD or by appointment
Locations and Times:
- Lecture: Illick 5; Tue-Thu 2:00-3:20
- Recitation Sections:
- A: Tues, 3:30-4:25 - Baker 310
- B: Tues, 5:00-5:55 - Baker 314
- C: Wed, 3:45-4:40 - Baker 314
- D: Thurs, 8:00-8:55 - Baker 314
See Syllabus with tentative week-by-week schedule.
Overview
This is a broad, foundational course. The overarching goal is familiarize students with fundamental topics in wildlife ecology and management.
Wildlife ecology is an extremely complex science, that touches on themes like population dynamics, behaviors, space use, disease, habitat, trophic interactions. Wildlife ecology is studied with a complex suite of rapidly evolving, multidisciplinary tools – field observations, advancing technology, statistics and modeling.
Wildlife management places all the complexity of wildlife ecology into a sloppy social, political, historical, ethical and legal realm. Most professional “wildlife” managers will openly admit that they spend much more time trying to manage people.
In this course, we will introduce methods, theories, concepts, and contemporary research topics in wildlife ecology, placing these into the very human inflected context of management.
We will hopefully also get you even more interested in wildlife ecology than you maybe already are! It is my opinion (and that of most of my colleagues!) that there is no better or more interesting job than being a wildlife ecologist.