YSB 637E - Biogeography

Dersin Amaçları

The course will provide a historical background for the field of biogeography and the ecological
foundations needed to understand the distribution and abundance of species and their changes over
time. It will also discuss developing technologies (including genomic tools and environmental
models) together with the availability of big data and increasingly sophisticated analytical tools to
examine the relevance of the field to global change biology, conservation, and invasion biology, as
well as sustainable food systems and ecosystem services.

Dersin Tanımı

Biogeography is a dynamic field that seeks to understand the role of historical factors in shaping
biodiversity and to develop predictive capacities for gauging how biodiversity will respond to our
rapidly changing world. Historically largely descriptive, it has become a rigorous science. The field
synthesizes information from a broad range of fields, and the conceptual diversity of the field of
biogeography is enormous, including basic sciences (historical biogeography, macroecology,
physiological biogeography, remote sensing, paleobiogeography, ecoinformatics, evolutionary
biology, ecosystem science, climatology) but also social sciences (linguistics, cultural biogeography),
and applied disciplines (global change biology, invasion biogeography, disease ecology,
environmental health).