832321 BOKU International wildlife lectures

Type
Lecture and seminar
Semester hours
2
Lecturer (assistant)
Windt, Jendrik , Mills, L. Scott , Kunz, Florian
Organisation
Offered in
Wintersemester 2022/23
Languages of instruction
Englisch
Content

This years course will be held within 1 week by the the guest lecturer Scott L. Mills from Montana, USA.

Update 01.09.:
Course materials added: including the mandatory reading list and the schedule of the course!
Also time slots updated!


APPLIED WILDLIFE POPULATION ECOLOGY

Our planet faces daunting challenges, as human-caused stressors (including climate change, invasive species, habitat loss, and pollutants) cause elevated rates of loss of biodiversity. However, the sophisticated science of applied population ecology can provide insights to help catalyze the transformative changes needed for biodiversity conservation. This course will address topics across the broad reach of applied population ecology, where ecology, evolutionary biology, genomics, field studies, and population modelling intersect. It is at this juncture where we find practical and non-intuitive (often surprising!) insights about potential solutions that may reverse the effects of human-caused stressors on wild populations.

By the end of the course, students should have the confidence to advance both management and research by effectively using data, models, and ecological concepts to address pressing questions involving the harvest, monitoring, and conservation of wildlife populations. This will include an understanding of population dynamics (eg. trends in abundance), projections of deterministic and stochastic population models with stage structure, mechanisms and modeling of density dependence (positive and negative), targeting specific conservation actions through sensitivity analysis, metapopulation and source-sink dynamics, viability analysis, and the interface between genetic variation and population performance. The focus will be on how to rigorously analyze population dynamics and apply the inferences to better conservation decisionmaking.
Previous knowledge expected

Basics in Wildlife Biology and Ecology
Objective (expected results of study and acquired competences)

competences within population ecology; ability to adapt concepts to real world situations
You can find more details like the schedule or information about exams on the course-page in BOKUonline.