Week 1: intro to ecology

# Week 1: intro to ecology
### Tad Dallas
### LSU

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# .font300[Syllabus]

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# .font300[Final project]

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# Readings

.font200[Purugganan, Mary, and Jan Hewitt. "How to read a scientific article." Rice University (2004). ]
<https://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cainproj/courses/HowToReadSciArticle.pdf>

.font200[Ecological Society of America. What does ecology have to do with me?] 
<https://www.esa.org/about/what-does-ecology-have-to-do-with-me/>

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# That's all for today

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## What is ecology?

### The study of interactions between biological organisms and their environment.

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## Interactions with same species

+ .font200[Competition]
  + .font200[food]
  + .font200[space]
  + .font200[mates]
+ .font200[Cannibalism]
+ .font200[Dispersal processes]

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## Interactions with different species

+ .font200[Competition]
+ .font200[Predator -- prey]
+ .font200[Plant -- pollinator]
+ .font200[Host -- parasite]

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## Interactions with the environment

+ .font200[Allelopathy]
+ .font200[Thermal tolerance]
+ .font200[Disturbance ecology]
+ .font200[Dispersal limitation]
+ .font200[Ecosystem engineers]

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# Environmentalism

### A political and social ideology seeking to limit human impact on the environment

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# Biomedicine

###  Gets conflated with ideas of "mainstream medicine"
### Generally applies to clinical practice and only to human populations (can some part of the environment make me better?)

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# Natural history

### Descriptive study of natural organisms

### Slightly separate from ecology, though ecological studies often utilize museum collections, and museum collections are essentially natural history storehouses

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# Evolution

### Change of allele frequencies over time

### Strong feedbacks with ecological processes

>  .font250["Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution"]
- Theodosius Dobzhansky

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# levels of biological organization

![](figs/ecologicalOrganization.png)

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# Individual

### A single individual of a species.

### e.g., a single trout in lake superior

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# Population

### A collection of individuals that occupy a given geographic area and interact with one another.

### e.g., trout in lake superior

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# Community

### A set of interacting species that occupy a given geographic area.

### e.g., fish communities in lake superior

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# Ecosystem

### The set of interacting species (the community) and the interactions between these species and their physical environment.

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# Biosphere

### The global environment, consisting of all living things on the planet.

### e.g., the planet

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# What is the role of the environment and land use change to each level?

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## Individual

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## Population

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## Community

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## Ecosystem

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## Biosphere

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# How do we do ecology?

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## Observations

![](figs/observation.jpg)

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## Manipulative experiments

![](figs/field.png)

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## Laboratory experiments

![](figs/lab.jpg)

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# Ecological modeling

## SI model as an example