NTRES 6450

Ecological Futures: Restoration & Adaptation

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2026-2027 Catalog.

Historical conditions are becoming less reliable guides to ecological futures. Climate change, disturbance regimes, and changing human priorities challenge conventional ideas about what it means to restore an ecosystem into the future. This course focuses on how restoration, conservation, and management should respond when returning to the past may be impossible, undesirable, or ecologically difficult. Topics will include succession and community assembly, ecological transformation, biodiversity-ecosystem functioning, disturbance ecology, and climate change adaptation with the historical, economic, and biological dimensions of environmental change. Classes will include lectures, discussion, and group problem-solving activities.

Distribution Requirements (DLG-AG, MQL-AG, SCH-AG)

Last 4 Terms Offered (None)

Learning Outcomes

• Explain and apply concepts from succession, community assembly, disturbance ecology, and biodiversity-ecosystem functioning to predict ecosystem trajectories under environmental change.
• Critically evaluate historical baselines, reference conditions, novel ecosystems, and alternative future trajectories when defining defensible ecological goals.
• Interpret ecological data, climate projects, primary literature figures, and qualitative evidence to compare alternative restoration and adaptation strategies and identify key uncertainties.
• Evaluate resistance, resilience, natural regeneration, community design, and disturbance-management strategies in relation to ecological feasibility, risk, and future conditions.
• Analyze how land-use history, tenure, governance, cultural values, knowledge systems, and economic scaffolds shape ecological futures and management choices.
• Synthesize ecological and social evidence to develop, communicate, critique, and revise a future-oriented ecosystem strategy.
• Construct and compare alternative ecological futures, identify robust versus contingent strategies, and define thresholds or triggers that would justify changing management direction.
• Facilitate evidence-based discussion and communicate complex scientific arguments to the class.
• Produce an individual evidence and uncertainty analysis that synthesizes literature and data, identifies critical knowledge gaps, and proposes monitoring, research, or adaptive-management approaches to reduce decision-relevant uncertainty.

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