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Ecology 25105, spring 2021 SHORT SUMMARY OF COURSE CONTENTS AND OTHER PRACTICAL INFORMATION

Dear students for Ecology 25105, We look forward to welcome you at this course in a short while. Below follows practical information about the course. Please remember to acquire the text book before the beginning of the course. Best wishes Thomas Kiørboe

Format: Each course day will be a mixture of lectures and student exercises/discussions. We plan on having two field excursions in the course of the spring, but due to the Covid-19 situation these are likely to be replaced by online activities. We are also prepared to teach the rest of the course online, if necessary. Approximately mid-way through the course you will be presented with a small selection of home-work projects that you will do in small groups. On the final course day the groups will present the results of their project work as poster that they will explain and defend in front of the instructors and fellow students. See outline of course below. Where and when: Tuesdays 08:15-12:00. We still do not know in what auditorium the teaching will take place, but in any case the course starts on-line. We will use Zoom for the course. Please use this link to connect to the class: Join Zoom Meeting https://dtudk.zoom.us/j/65252419948 Meeting place and time may be different on the days of excursions, if these materialize. Text book: Singer, F.D. (2016) Ecology in action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 706 pp. The book is available in the DTU bookshop; if you use this link you will get a 10 % discount: https://www.polyteknisk.dk/home/dtu/soege_resultat?utf8=%E2%9C %93&q=25105&b=20&st=c&code=&exact_match=false . The text book will be supplemented with additional relevant reading material (e.g., articles) as well as copies of Power Point presentations for each lecture. The additional material will be uploaded on DTU Learn. We will make one content module per course day, and the reading material will be uploaded well in advance to each course day. Exam: The course will conclude with a written exam (open books). In addition, successful presentation and defense of the home-work project on the last course day is a requirement.

Teachers: The course if offered jointly between two institutes (DTU Aqua and DTU Env) and you will meet the following teachers: Thomas Kiørboe (course responsible), Kim Aarestrup, Teis Nørgaard Mikkelsen, Andreas Ibrom, Stefan Trapp. Course plan: The course has three parts: (i) general concepts in ecology, (ii) aquatic ecology, and (iii) terrestrial ecology. The individual course days are briefly outlined below:

GENERAL CONCEPTS: (4 course days) 1. Organisms/individuals (2/2): Life forms (autotrophs, heterotrophs, osmotrophs, mixotrophs); energy budgets/eco-physiology of individual organisms (resource acquisition, growth, respiration, reproduction, and how it materializes for different life forms); size-scaling;, symbiosis. (Teacher: Teis Nørgaard Mikkelsen). Singer: p50 (Mangrove forest) 4.0-4.4 (p86113) 2. Element cycles from local to global scales (9/2): C, N, P, water, others (with a focus on ‘natural’ flows, but with an eye to emissions and human impact) (Teis Nørgaard Mikkelsen). Singer Chapter 20 (499-521) + Chapter 23 (579-607. 3. Populations and species interactions (16/2): What is a population?; population growth (exponential and logistic growth) and demography; species interactions (competition, predatorprey), population growth, simple models (of it all) (Thomas Kiørboe). Singer 10.2-10.4 (p. 253265), 11.2 (p. 277-282), 12.5 (318-321) and 14.5 (p.363-366). You can replace/supplement 11.2 and 12.5 with Ricklefs & Relyea p. 283-288 (uploaded on Campus net) 4. Evolution, adaptation, behavior, and life histories (253/2): Natural selection and trade-offs, genotypic variation as the substrate of natural selection, sources of variation, adaptation vs speciation, Darwinian fitness and optimization, optimal behavior/foraging, evolution of life histories(Thomas Kiørboe) Singer 3.2+3 (p 61-67), 3.4 (p.71-73), 6.1 (148-153), 8.1 (194-198, 201-203), 8.2 (203-209) AQUATIC ECOLOGY: (4 course days) 5. Diversity of aquatic systems (2/3): stream, river, lake, estuary, coastal ocean/shelf, open ocean; Ocean circulation; Aquatic food webs (phytoplankton, zooplankton, fish, microbial loop) and fluxes; controlling factors (nutrients, light); role of ocean in climate change. (Thomas Kiørboe). Singer 2.4 (41-54) + 23.1 (580-586 – repeat from lecture 2) + chapter 19 6. Aquatic resources (9/3): Fisheries (overfishing, fisheries management); aquaculture (shellfish, fish, seaweeds, other) (Thomas Kiørboe). Nothing in textbook – additional supplied material 7. Electrofishing (I) (16/3): Field trip; demonstration of an ecosystem, demonstration of aquatic organisms, demonstration of electrofishing as a method to assess fish stocks in a river (Kim Aarestrup and PhD students) Nothing in textbook – additional supplied material

8. Electrofishing (II) and human impacts on freshwater systems (23/3): follow up on field experiment, Anthropogenic threats to streams, engineers and river connectivity eutrophication and lake restoration (Kim Aarestrup and Henrik Baktoft) Nothing in textbook – additional supplied material

TERRESTRIAL ECOLOGY: (4 course days) 9. Fluxes of energy and carbon (I) (6/4): Excursion to the beech forest ecosystem investigation site in Sorø; methods of ecosystem observation (Andreas Ibrom, Teis Nørgaard Mikkelsen, field technicians, ). Guide to the excursion and Singer: 2(22-24), 2.1 (24-29), 5.1(118-119), 5.2 (121 from “A general model …”-128), 5.3(128-134), 5.4(134-137) (conclude from general principles for organisms to relevance at ecosystem scale) 10. Fluxes of energy and carbon (II) (13/4): Use of field data from the site to describe carbon cycling in the forest (Andreas Ibrom) (Pensum: commented lecture slides, Singer Chapter 19: (478 – 498, terrestrial parts)) 11. Ecosystem dynamics (20/4): Biogeography; habitats and biota (communities); natural succession (soils, vegetation) and the development of ecosystems; (Stefan Trapp) Singer 16.4 (p. 415-426) + Singer Chapter 21 (p. 522- 547) 12. Diversity of terrestrial ecosystems (27/4): controlling factors: temperature, nutrients, water. Biomes of the world, and their future (Stefan Trapp) Singer 2.1-2.3 (23-41) Supplement (Molles 12-46) SUMMARY AND SYNTHESIS: (1 course day) 13. (5/5) Student poster presentation of the results of home-work projects

Summary of readings in Singer: Pages: 22-54, 61-67, 71-73, 86-113, 118-119, 121-137, 148-153, 194-198, 201-209, 253-265, 277-282, 318-321, 363-366, 415-426, 478-547, 579-607...