Modern Concepts of BioScience (General Biology for majors) — Introductory study of the unifying principles common to all levels of biological organization. Cell biology, general physiology, genetics, embryology, evolution, ecology, and behavior are emphasized.
Junior Courses
Climate Change Biology — Biological and conservation responses to human-induced climate change, emphasizing the climate system, past climate influences, range shifts, phenological changes, extinction, predictive modeling, connectivity and landscape management, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and extinction risk from climate change solutions.
Ecology — Relationships between organisms and their environment, emphasizing adaptation, natural selection, population dynamics, species interactions, community structure, landscape dynamics, ecosystem energetics, broad-scale patterns of biological diversity, and climate change.
Senior / Graduate Course
Ornithology — Evolution, morphology, physiology, behavior, reproduction, ecology, geography, and migration of birds of the world. Field identification of Texas species by sight and sound.
Graduate Courses
Landscape Ecology — Ecological factors influencing landscape structure, exchanges among landscape components, and landscape stability and management, with emphasis on reciprocal relations between landscape patterns and underlying biological and physical processes.
Conservation Biology — Biological, socio-economic, and political factors that affect biological scarcity and diversity, emphasizing genetics, fitness, population viability, extinction, endemism, landscape transformation, community structure and stability, and management approaches.
Biometrics — Methods of sampling, experimental design, and quantitative analysis for graduate students with minimal quantitative training. Descriptive statistics, probability analyses, frequencies, correlation, least-squares regression, multiple comparisons, and one- and multi-way analysis of variance. Parametric and non-parametric approaches.
Biological Invasions: Ecology and Management — The invasion of natural systems by non-native plants and animals, emphasizing evolutionary ecology, impacts on native species, and effects on biodiversity. Biological-invasion causes, pathways, vectors, and management strategies in terrestrial and aquatic systems.
Climate Change and Biodiversity — Biological, conservation, and policy responses to human-induced climate change. Global greenhouse gas levels, recent climate trends, range and abundance changes, phenological changes, evolutionary effects, climate change projections and models, designing landscapes and seascapes for change, managing the landscape matrix, and the future of biodiversity.
Seminar: Methods in Spatial Ecology — Concepts and techniques of study design, surveys, and quantitative analysis for spatially autocorrelated ecological data. Multiscale analyses, spatial uncertainty, autoregressive and mixed models, and graph theory. Criteria for selecting statistical methods to quantify spatial pattern. Contemporary software for spatial analyses.
Special Problems: Applied Machine-Learning Models — Principles and applications of machine-learning techniques, including nearest-neighbor and naïve-Bayes classification, regression trees, model trees, classification decision trees, neural networks, support vector machines, ensemble methods (random forests, bagging, boosting), parallel processing, and evaluation of predictive performance. Modeling activities using R statistical software.
