Unit I. Basics and history: What do animals mean to us?

• 0. Highlights of the Syllabus
  
• 1. Definitions
• 2. Mini-Lecture on Referencing
• 3. Deep History of Human-Wildlife Interactions
• 4. History of Human-Wildife Interaction to present
  • Wildlife in the News- 2025

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

• 5. Counting Animals, Part I
• 6. Counting Animals, Part II
• 6b. Counting Ice Seals
• 7. Mark-Recapture and Index Counts

Unit III. Habitats and Ranges: Where are the animals and why?

• 8. Habitats Part I
• 9. Habitats Part II: The Niche Concept
• Guest Lectures (posted on Blackboard) on:
  • Forest Management for Wildlife - Dr. Andrew Vander Yacht
• 10. Modeling (just about) Everthing Part I
• 11. Modeling (just about) Everthing Part II
• 11b. Caribou Habitat Selection

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

• 12. Part I: Exponential Growth and Stochasticity
• 13. Part II: Limits on Growth
• 14. Part III: Structured Populations
• 15. Part IV: Everything Else
• 16. Physiology and Wildlife Diseases

Unit V Models of Wildlife Managment and Conservation

• 17. North American Model
• Guest Lectures (posted on Blackboard) on:
  • Indigeneous Models of Wildlife Conservation - Dr. Kyle Artelle
  • Wildfowl Management and Ecology - Dr. Michael Schummer
  • Hunter Perspectives - Dr. Nate Wehr
  • Ungulate management in Europe - Dr. Wibke Peters
• 18. Urban Wildlife Ecology

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.

• 1. Introduction to R
  (also R code, sea lion dataset, and flag abundance data).
• 1b. Estimating Abundances in R
  (also R code and flag count dataset)
• 2. Linear Modeling in R and SeaLions.csv)
• 3. Exponential Growth
  (also using the Washington State sea otter dataset and the British Columbia sea otter dataset)
• 4. Structured Populations