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

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Instructor: Dr. Elie Gurarie, Illick 206

Office hours: Thursday 3:30-4:30 - Illick 206, or by appointment

Co-instructors:

Locations and Times:

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.

Unit II. Estimating Abundances: How many animals are out there?

Unit IV Population Ecology: Why are there as many (or few) as there are?

Labs

These are mainly R labs. To use R, you have to either: (a) Use R on tour own computer (recommended). To do this you need to install R and R studio. Those are 2 different programs - both free. Links to download and install are here: https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/; (b) work with R on the cloud - which works fine for most purposes. To do this, you have to get a Posit Account at this link: https://posit.cloud/; or (c) work on computers in the computer labs, which should all have R and Rstudio installed.