Syllabus, Conservation Biology, BGY C63, Fall 2006
Welcome!
Professor: Dr Lisa Manne, email: bgyc63@utsc.utoronto.ca
Teaching Assistant : Cindy Bongard, email: bgyc63@utsc.utoronto.ca
Office hour (LM): Mon, 2:00 – 3:00, SW 548, or by appointment
Text: Essentials of Conservation Biology, Fourth Edition, by Richard Primack
Prerequisites: BGYB50 and BGYB51. These are non-negotiable; students not having these
will be flagged and removed! With a big hook!
Lecture:
Mon-Wed, 1:00 – 2:00, HW 214
Tutorial:
Thurs, 9:00 – 12:00, MW 262. Different times for the two tutorial groups:
Tutorial 1:
Sept 14
Sept 28
Oct 12
Oct 26
Nov 9
Nov 23
Nov 30
Tutorial 2:
Sept 21
Oct 5
Oct 12
Nov 2
Nov 16
Nov 23
Nov 30
All emails about tutorials, group projects, course material, etc. should go to
bgyc63@utsc.utoronto.ca.
Marks
Group project:
Paper:
Presentation:
Your Assessment:
Others' (within group) assessment of you:
Other groups' assessment of your group:
Dog-strangling vine project:
In-class work:
Midterm exam:
Final exam (comprehensive, but weighted
toward the latter half of the course):
32 %
15 %
12 %
1%
2%
2%
10 %
8%
25 %
25 %
Midterm: Short answer, long answer.
Final exam: Will be comprehensive, again short answer, long answer.
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Syllabus, Conservation Biology, BGY C63, Fall 2006
About cheating and plagiarism:
These remarks pertain to all assignments. Cheating or plagiarism will result in a mark of 0 for
the assignment (including exams). There will be no second chances or do-overs. The
arguments "I didn't know what plagiarism was" or "I didn't know cheating was wrong" or "I
didn't know that counted as plagiarism" or "I have done this in other classes, and never had a
problem" or "Stephen Harper says cheating is ok" carry no weight with me. You have been
warned. Note that for the group project paper, any instance of plagiarism will result in a 0 mark
for all group members. Be self-policing.
Major assignments
1. Group project: You will work in groups of four to go through the primary scientific
literature (primary literature means peer-reviewed journal articles, NOT WEBPAGES) to
synthesize a conservation-related topic. A topic will be closed when 4 people have signed up for
it. An instruction guide for the group projects is below; a list of potential topics will be posted
online. The group project will require a lot of effort on everyone’s part; the sooner you get
started, the better. Everyone will need to have signed up for a group project by October 2. I will
provide general guidance for the projects, and particular guidance for each project topic. By
October 23, your group needs to have met with me to show me what literature you have already
found. Presentations will be given during the last two tutorial periods, November 23 and 30;
attendance for these is required, and material from these presentations is fair game for the final
exam.
2. The dog-strangling vine project will be a field data collecting exercise (during the Sept 28
and Oct 5 tutorials), and then a statistical analysis of your data, culminating in a (no more than)
four-page write-up of your findings. The format for this write-up should be a typical
Introduction – Methods – Results – Discussion – Conclusion. This write-up is due October 20.
While you will collect the data in groups of four, each person will individually analyze the data
and write it up.
Important Deadlines:
Oct 2
Oct 20
Oct 23
Group projects chosen
Dog-strangling vine report due to Cindy (5 pm)
Groups need to have met with me once by this date (see group instructions)
Midterm (will cover material through the Oct 18 lecture, unless I tell you
otherwise in class)
Nov 19
Nov 23
Nov 30
Dec 4
Dec
Drop date
Group project presentations [randomly-assigned]
Group project presentations [randomly-assigned]
Group project papers due to me (5 pm)
Final exam
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Syllabus, Conservation Biology, BGY C63, Fall 2006
Lecture topics
Topic
Documenting biodiversity
Valuing biodiversity
Documenting/predicting
extinctions
Consequences of small
populations
Choosing priority areas
Management tools & issues
Policy
Particularly
What is conservation? What is biodiversity?
Measuring biodiversity: the species concept,
species vs. populations vs. ecosystems. How
many species? Where is biodiversity located?
Why conserve? Ethics, enjoyment, economics,
services
Extinctions in geological time. Pre-industrial
humans. Modern biodiversity decline.
Modern causes of extinction (over-harvesting,
habitat destruction/fragmentation, species
invasions). Organizations that attempt to
document these things. Predicting extinction
risk of species.
Rarity and demography. Rarity and
metapopulation structure. Rarity and genetics.
Minimum viable population concept
Incorporating costs/tradeoffs when choosing
conservation priority areas. SLOSS. Case
study: choosing marine conservation areas.
Single species care (e.g. hand-pollination) &
costs. Establishing new populations. Habitat
maintenance (fires) or management (selective
logging, etc.). Restoration, captive breeding,
cryogenesis, re-introductions, cloning.
Conservation policy around the world (Britain,
Canada, US, Australia, Africa); history.
Enforcement of legislation in US (case
studies). CITES (international agreement) and
other approaches to conservation (land for
debt, concessions, endowments)
Chapters
1, 2, 3
4, 5, 6
7, 8, 9,
10
11, 12
15, 16,
17, 18
13, 14,
19
20, 21
Readings, for in-class discussion and writing assignments
In addition to readings from your text, I will be assigning extra articles for you to read. These
are not optional; listen in class and watch the intranet for these extra readings.
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Syllabus, Conservation Biology, BGY C63, Fall 2006
Group project instructions
The paper. You are to synthesize the literature on your topic, and write a review article that is
suitable for submission to Trends in Ecology & Evolution (TREE). Review articles offer a
balanced account of newly emerging or rapidly progressing fields, and provide a guide to the
most relevant recent literature and indication of future research. These reviews are about 4500
words, not counting the references and any figures. I have put a few examples online: Baker &
Clapham (on modeling whale populations), Srivastava et al. 2004 (on using microcosm
communities as models for other communities), and Hosken & Stockley (on sexual selection and
genital evolution). If you have a particularly broad topic (you will know when you see how deep
the literature is) you may have to narrow it further. If you are unsure whether you should narrow
your topic further, speak to me. But remember that you should model your review on the
reviews in Trends in Ecology & Evolution (if you want to see more reviews, U of T has a
subscription to this journal; you can browse recent issues from any computer). It is not legal to
narrow your topic so much that you are only synthesizing a small number of source articles.
The TREE review articles online provide you with some guidance. They tend to summarize and
synthesize with more text, and relatively few figures or graphics.
The presentation. You need to give a talk in class summarizing your topic. This talk should be
between 20 and 30 minutes long, and each member of the group needs to present a part of it. If
you bring in your typed paper and read it, you will receive no credit. In contrast to your paper,
your presentation will depend quite heavily on figures and graphics. Note that if you have only
20 to 30 minutes, you cannot present every bit of every one of your sources. You will need to
choose which papers and graphics present the most important material, and you will have to
organize that material into a coherent whole (presentation).
Your assessment. You need to send me an email (using the assessment form I will post online)
telling me which parts of the group's work you were responsible for, and which parts the other
folks did. If the others' assessments (within group) of you agree with your own assessment, and
if the input/work is relatively evenly distributed among members, then you will get full credit for
these parts. A separate component of your group project mark will be the mark given you by
your peers outside of your group. These will be on standard forms that I will give you, and are
required from everyone.
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