Community ecology. Introduction to ecological theory.

The website you are viewing is a companion to the course MB162P28 from the Department of Botany at the Faculty of Science of Charles University.

This course aims at presenting major concepts in current ecological thinking, mainly at interspecific and community levels. It has a strong theoretical component, and is organized as a hands-on course, with interactive paper reading and discussions, and modelling of ecological concepts in the R environment and Shiny.

Course website on SIS

Each lesson has these parts:

• reading and paper discussion (for papers to be read for each lesson, see 2017En.xls on SIS).

  We expect that everybody will read one paper thoroughly, and have a look at the other paper.
  At the lesson, we will give some time (10-15 mins) to each group to discuss the paper among themselves.
  Then each group will present the paper to the other group (no formal presentation, but whiteboard-marker system welcome).

  The presentation should primarily concentrate on:

  • what the authors wanted to know and why it was interesting (context)
  • how they did it (overview of the methodology; details need not be discussed),
  • basic findings, and
  • what does it mean (how the findings contribute to the questions at the beginning).

  Group A: surnames begin with A-M, Group B: surnames begin with N-Z

• lecture by one of us, where we will present concepts and ideas from the given topic (1 to 1.5 hrs)

• practicals with R functions illustrating some of the phenomena from the given topic (ca 1 hr).

  Knowledge of the R environment is helpful, but not strictly necessary. The course is currently being adapted for Shiny, but all functions and scripts are available at the course listing on SIS.

  Even with code running in R, all functions and scripts are available in advance, and only minor modifications are necessary to make the whole thing run.