This
course will be of interest to students wishing to understand how organisms
interact with one another and with their environment, and how changes to the
environment (including those caused by humans) may affect these interactions.
Students will explore the main ecological processes in terms of individuals,
populations and communities. Individuals are considered in terms of their
physiological interactions with the environment and the causes of migration,
dispersal and mortality, scaling up to different models of population growth.
Ecological interactions such as, competition, predation and parasitism’s lead
to population-level processes, while larger-scale phenomena (such as energy
flow and community structure) underpin an understanding of community and
ecosystem ecology. Agriculture, Disease, Pollution and Conservation – key areas
where humans and their environment interact – are also considered from the
standpoint of applied biology.