Overview

This is a broad, foundational course, the overarching goal is to make students familiar with fundamental topics in wildlife ecology and management.

Wildlife ecology is an extremely complex science, that explores themes like population dynamics, behaviors, space use, disease, habitat, trophic interactions, that is studied with a suite of rapidly evolving 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 a great many of my colleagues) that there is no better or more interesting job than being a wildlife ecologist.

Lectures

Labs

• 1. Introduction to R
     (also R code and sea lion dataset)
• 2. Estimating Abundances in R
     (also R code and flag count dataset)
• 3. Linear Models
     (also using the sea lion dataset)
• 4. Exponential Growth
     (also using the Washington State sea otter dataset and the British Columbia sea otter dataset)
• 5. Structured Populations