BIO 343 - Climate Change Biology (3)

Prerequisites: Must have a C- or better in BIO 110 , BIO 111 , and BIO 112 , or permission.

Human driven climate change from the burning of fossil fuels and other anthropogenic activities is having profound impacts across our biosphere. While much of the public attention is placed on rising temperatures of land and ocean, there is much less attention focused on the biological impacts of climate change. The most well-known biological impact of climate change is bleaching of coral reefs, but other impacts such as altered species distributions and nutrient cycling also result from climate change. The objective of this course, Climate Change Biology, is meant to provide students with an opportunity to more clearly understand the wide-ranging biological impacts of climate change. Although students in this class will become familiar with the basic climatological phenomena and data surrounding climate change, the vast majority of the course will look to examine biological impacts of climate change. The students taking this course will understand how human driven climate change impacts biological systems across ecosystem types both terrestrial (phenology changes, species invasions, resource allocation) and marine (ocean acidification, coral bleaching, oceanic carbon sequestration, feeding relationship changes). Additionally, students in this course will understand the biological impacts of climate change from molecular to ecosystem and evolutionary scales. Students will examine how climate change biology is being studied by the scientific community by reading primary research literature.