Synopsis of BIOGEOGRAPHY BIOL/GEOG/GEOL 4100/8106

Biogeography is concerned with the distribution in space of living things and how this has varied through time. It depends on, informs, and is related in various ways to such diverse subdisciplines as ecology, systematics, evolutionary biology, paleontology, and others. This course is intended to provide an introduction to the concepts and methods of biogeography, and an overview of the problems that have been important historically or are currently of interest to biogeography.

A large part of the course will be dedicated to understanding the principles of biogeography. We will discuss ways of characterizing the diversity and biogeographic distribution of organisms at various levels of organization, from species level to ecosystems. This will include supporting concepts from systematics and ecology, and will present qualitative and quantitative methods of description. We will discuss the conditions and processes that maintain and modify biogeographic distributions. This will include environmental and ecological constraints and relationships, evolutionary processes, and other historical developments, such as plate tectonics. We will discuss analytical methods that have been developed to attempt to discover explanations for biogeographic distributions as a result of dynamic processes or historical effects. Finally we will look at how biogeography has become important as an applied science in conservation biology.

We will also review major biogeographic regions of the world and the distributions of plant and animal groups. This descriptive information will be used throughout the course to illustrate concepts and provide examples of the various principles presented. It will also provide a survey of ancient and modern distributions of groups that will provide an overall picture of the biogeography of the Earth.

Evaluation will be based on exams, participation in classroom discussions and a term paper. Graduate students will be required to give an oral presentation of their research topic to the class, and will receive a grade for the presentation. Grades for students enrolled for graduate credit will be figured separately from those taking the undergraduate course. Students taking the course for undergraduate credit will have the option of giving an oral presentation for extra credit, with the exception of those students taking the course for honors credit, for whom the presentation is required.

See the course outline.