Biology: Population and Community Ecology

Dive into the fascinating world of ecology during this course. You will explore key ecological processes at the population level, including predation, competition, mutualism, and parasitism. Discover how plant and animal communities are structured through food web interactions and the role of keystone species.

Throughout the course, you will gain insights into the dynamics and structure of populations and communities, and understand the impact of human activities on these processes. You will also develop practical skills to identify ecological issues, conduct ecological studies, analyze data, and critically evaluate scientific papers. Plus, you will learn to present your ecological projects both orally and in writing.

A highlight of the course is a regional excursion and a research project during the final part, offering hands-on experience and a deeper connection to the subject.

The teaching consists of lectures, seminars, computer exercises, and course projects. The seminars are linked to the theoretical parts of the course and focus on particular book chapters or articles of relevance to the different course themes. In the computer exercises, you primarily work with empirical data from real field studies. In an individual literature project, you search for information on a particular ecological topic and then evaluate and summarise the results in a short popular science article. In connection with this work, there is an exercise on how to find relevant articles in ISI databases. The regional one week excursion takes place in eastern Skåne. Each day is spent in a particular habitat, where we identify ecological problems, formulate hypotheses, collect data and perform appropriate statistical analyses to test these hypotheses. The course ends with a two-week research project, in which you work in a group to perform a complete ecological study, from the planning stage to the oral and written presentation of the results.

Examination consists of two written examinations; one in which you analyse and evaluate ecological data from a previous study, and one in which you write the discussion of an authentic article from which the real discussion has been removed.

Prerequisites

90 ECTS in Science including a course corresponding to BIOC02 Ecology 15 ECTS.

Selection criteria

Seats are allocated according to: ECTS (HPAV): 100 %.

Tuition fees for non-EU/EEA citizens

Citizens of countries outside:

• The European Union (EU)
• The European Economic Area (EEA) and
• Switzerland

are required to pay tuition fees. You pay an instalment of the tuition fee in advance of each
semester.

Tuition fees, payments and exemptions

Full programme/course tuition fee: SEK 46,250
First payment: SEK 46,250

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Note that you may also need to pay an application fee, or provide proof of exemption.

Application fee

No tuition fees for citizens of the EU, EEA and Switzerland

There are no tuition fees for citizens of the European Union (EU), the European Economic Area (EEA) and Switzerland.