Intermediate trips will be taken to riparian, oak woodland and coastal marsh habitats. This course investigates the relationships of plants to the environment, with emphasis on the importance of plants to humans for food, fiber, fuel, and medicine. Both laboratory and local field trips will be heavily employed in this course. Students will work on independent research projects, some of which will be in the field, but most of which will require controlled environments, and permanent experiments set up in a greenhouse or Laboratory. Three lectures and one three-hour laboratory per week.
Green plants provide humans with food, fiber, fuel and medicine.
They enable animal life through oxygen production, nutrient transformations and solar energy capture. This seminar will focus on our plant natural resources, utilizing examples found in the Santa Monica Mountains and coastal regions near the Malibu campus. We will not only examine current problems of environmental degradation but will emphasize possible solutions through wise management practices, formulated through the scientific principles of plant ecology. Emphasis will be placed on utilizing the scientific method to understand how forest ecosystems work and the application of this knowledge to sustain forest ecosystem function. The combined efforts of majors in biology with non-majors will uniquely illustrate the connections between scientific discovery and scientific application.