Tropical Ecology - Supplement
Section E—Supplementary Information
1. Information for a new course:
a. A description of the reasons behind the proposal. (How will the course fit into the
curriculum? What are the goals of the new course?)
b. An indication of how the course serves students (its relationship to graduate, preprofessional, or vocational objectives; and how it relates to other existing courses).
a. Reasons behind the course proposal:
The tropics contain an extraordinary fraction of the world’s diversity, widely varied ecosystems
in structure and function, and unique species and groups found nowhere else in the world. The
tropics also face enormous conservation challenges. This course on tropical ecology gives
students a short survey on all major tropical ecosystems. It is a unique offering in the department,
exposing students to material and experiences that would be impossible to cover in any existing
course. Furthermore, the course is a lab course. Students design and implement independent
projects and in so doing learn important principles of project/experimental design in ecology, as
well as some basics of statistical data analysis. This course fills an important hole in our
curriculum. Many universities offer field-based tropical ecology courses to their students – either
directly or through participation in consortia, such as the Organization for Tropical Studies
(OTS). University of Massachusetts Boston does not.
This course will be a 300-level course and will partially fulfill the 300-level course requirement
for Biology majors.
b. How does this course serve students:
This course builds on existing intermediate level courses in the department, but it serves students
by exposing them to a new and (in many ways) entirely different biological experience – tropical
field ecology & evolution. Most active tropical researchers (including myself) report the
experience of a tropical ecology undergraduate course or research experience as being of
formative importance in their development as scientists. Even for students who will not go on to
pursue post-graduate studies in this area, the course offers students a hands-on ‘crash-course’ in
field project design and implementation and statistical data analysis. This type of demanding
field laboratory study will serve students well regardless of their future endeavors.