Course description:

This course introduces students to the distribution patterns of wild plants and animals and to the factors that determine these patterns. By the end of the course, you should be able to understand and use ecological and biogeographical terminology; be able to map the distribution and describe the nature of earth's major terrestrial biomes; be able to ask biogeographical questions; and be able to formulate sound hypotheses to explain the variety and ever-changing geographic ranges of living organisms.

Biogeography is an integrative field of inquiry that unites concepts and information from ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, and physical geography and uses the perspectives and methodologies of geography. In this course you will be exposed to theories and data from several disciplines and be expected to synthesize them into a coherent view of the dynamic nature of plant and animal distribution.

TEXT: Biogeography (second edition). by James H. Brown and Mark V. Lomolino. Sinauer Associates, 1998.

Course outline:

I. MAJOR DISTRIBUTION PATTERNS

• The history of the discipline: some basic patterns revealed (zoogeographic regions; life zones, ecogeographic rules)
• The terrestrial biomes: vegetation, soils, faunal adaptations; mapping at a global scale

II. A DYNAMIC EARTH

• Plate tectonics and its effects on climate and the distribution of organisms
• Pleistocene glaciations and their consequences in biogeography

III. IMPORTANT EVOLUTIONARY, ECOLOGICAL, AND BIOGEOGRAPHICAL PROCESSES

• Speciation and extinction
• Dispersal
• Reconstructing biogeographic histories

IV. ISLAND BIOGEOGRAPHY

• Evolutionary patterns
• The Theory of Island Biogeography
• Applications of island biogeography theory in conservation of biodiversity

Return to Biogeography Home Page and specifics for Fall 1998

Created July 1996 by Susan L. Woodward. Last modified September 15, 1998 by SLW.