Biology 338 Vegetation Ecology general themes: (1) The investigation of patterns and processes in plant communities (2) Solutions to the problem of complexity (3) Interpretation of scientific figures and graphics (4) Reading and understanding scientific literature

Lab             Requirements             Papers

Topical Outline

Part 1: Natural history of vegetation from global to regional, the community concept, succession, niche theory and plant strategies

Part 2: Multivariate methods for the simplification of complex data; gradient analysis and classification

Part 3: Experimental ecology of stress and disturbance, the nature of interactions and experimental investigations, components of diversity as summative indices of complex data, patterns of diversity, diversity experiments, and a synthesis

Part 4: Community assembly theory, functional community ecology, metacommunity theory, and a taste of mechanistic theory for vegetation ecology

images of Wisconsin Vegetation
maps

biology department