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.