Here is a word cloud based on the questions that you identified as interesting.

The environment in which species live (and interact) can be characterized in terms of conditions that set the boundaries for life and resources that can be consumed. Today we discuss the these terms en route to the definition of the ecological niche.

1. • Definition of Condition — Physiochemical features that can be altered but not consumed
   • Conditions can often alter the interactions of species
     • Methodological aside — how to read a survival plot
   • Definition of Resource — characteristics of environment that can be consumed
     • adding more resources should generally be better, but not always
   • Resources may be other species — we classify types of consumers based on scale
   • Depletion of resources can lead to competition — within species and between species — leading to density dependence
   • An ecological niche is a summary of a species’ requirements and tolerances — a characteristic of the species, not the environment

Dobzhansky famously said that “nothing in biology makes sense, except in the light of evolution” — I would suggest that evolution hardly makes sense except in the light of ecology, which defines the selective landscape against which evolution and natural selection play out.

1. • Individuals in populations are not identical, some variation is heritable — common garden and reciprocal transplant experiments are classic approaches to identifying which variation IS heritable
   • Phenotypic plasticity is the ability to display different phenotypes in different environments
   • Different ancestors leave different numbers of descendants — in part because they are better suited to the local environment
   • Adaptation to local conditions and resources can drive speciation because hybrids may be less suited to specific environments — success can only be explained in light of environmental context.
   • Similar ecology drives similar selection — convergent and parallel evolution illustrate how similar ecological conditions result in similar, and predictable, evolutionary paths (relevant for applied ecology in harvest and resistance management)
   • All these processes that change the relative frequencies of genotypes within a population (differential survival and reproduction) can change the relative frequencies of species in communities as well — and given the inter-dependence of species, can have cascading effects on communities.

It’s a fools errand to try and teach you everything in ecology (or any field). Rather, the goal of this course is give you the vocabulary and understanding of the field let you tackle the remaining questions on your own. To that end, let’s start with what ecologists themselves see as the major outstanding questions in the field.

In 2013, a large collection of ecologists conducted a survey of the field to identify the 100 questions that reflect the current state of scientific inquiry in ecology. They summarized these questions in the following journal article:

https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1365-2745.12025

By class on Friday, please read this article (a lot of it is just a list of questions) and identify 5 questions that are most interesting/relevant to you. Note, I don’t expect you to understand every question — some of them use jargon that we’ll cover later in this class.  This is designed to get a sense of the interests in the class so that I can target topics as we go along.

Submit your top 5 questions on the course Canvas site by the start of class on Friday.

Welcome back on this dreary Monday.  Today we’ll cover the basics . . . What is Ecology?  Today’s lecture should hopefully touch on the following:

1. • Classical definitions of ecology
   • Modern definition of ecology
   • Applied questions in ecology
   • Fundamental questions in ecology
   • Scales of ecology – community, populations, individuals