Office of Academic Affairs
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Bhopal

BIO 414: Ecology (4)

Ecology of individual organisms; population ecology; ecological communities; ecosystem ecology (food chain, food web, primary producers, primary production, secondary production, consumers, decomposers, decomposition, energy flow, biomass vs. production, ecological efficiency, detritus vs. grazing food chains, transport of production); community change: disturbance, succession, climax, phenology, seasonal pattern; adaptive evolution, neutral evolution, selection, maintenance of genetic variation, evolution of genotype, phenotype, evolution of sex, life history traits, r and K selection, group selection, extinction; trophic interactions: plant-pollinator, plant-disperser, herbivory, predation, optimal foraging, parasitism, competition, mutualism; biogeochemistry: nutrient cycling, hydrologic cycle, watershed studies, biological control of atmosphere and ocean; conservation ecology.

Suggested Books:

• Ecology,Second Edition by Michael L. Cain, William D. Bowman, and Sally D. Hacker, published by Sinauer Associates.  3rd edition. 2014
• The Economy of Nature, Robert Ricklefs, Sixth Edition, 2008. Freeman, W. H. & Company
• Cotgreave, Peter and Irwin Forseth. Introductory Ecology. Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd, 2002.
• Krebs, John R. and Nicholas B. Davies. An Introduction to Behavioral Ecology, 3rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Science Ltd, 1993.
• Krebs, C. J. 2008. Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance (6th edition). Benjamin Cummings, Boston, MA.

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