Tropical Ecology Course Online

Course Description: This course explores ecology and conservation with a focus on tropical forests. 

The textbook: John Kricher's Tropical Ecology

This page: Going to paste links to my lectures, a reading list, and random stuff. Assignments and readings will be through the portal. I'm making this public so anyone can see what is taught in the course. 

Topics 

• The stage
• Biomes of the world and their drivers
• Major habitats within the tropics 
• Global diversity and history of tropical forests 
• The players: Tour of tropical diversity 
• Plants and Forests 
• Fungi 
• Invertebrates 
• Vertebrates 
• Fish 
• Amphibians and Reptiles 
• Mammals 
• Archosaurs
• The ecological play 
• Ecosystem services
• Nutrient cycling 
• Disturbances 
• Predation and coevolution in the tropics
• Threats to tropical forests 
• Conservation in the tropics 
• 
  

Reading list for the tropical ecologist (or enthusiast)

• Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle - Could be called "Tales of a twenty-year old naturalist" 
• The Shaman's Apprentice - if you dig ethnobotany, this is a must
• 
  

A coffee & birds study from the home of coffee

There are a number of bird studies looking at the effects of coffee plantations versus forests or shade coffee versus sun coffee. Most of these studies are from Central and South America and very few from Africa. 

Recently accepted in a special issue of Biological Conservation is a study by graduate student Even Buechley and colleages on shade coffee in a region of Ethiopia where coffee is a native species. I love thinking about locals picking coffee beans in the area for hundreds (thousands?) of years. My long lost coffee cousins. Unfortunately, there isn't a link from the journal but the University of Utah published a press release. The link from Biological Conservation should be appearing soon. 

Coffee is a shrub and shade coffee plantations grow under large trees that shade the plants below. Studies from the Americas show, very strongly, that shade coffee is much better for birds than sun coffee. You can now buy coffee from shade coffee plantations if you wish to support birds - I do. In Ethiopia, this study showed that coffee plantations had more species than forest and coffee plantations served as adequate habitat for several forest species as well as migrant birds from Europe (yes, birds migrate there too!). 

Shade coffee plantation with coffee below and canopy above.
Photo Credit: Evan Buechley, University of Utah.

This study is going to get some great press - as it deserves. Large portions of the tropics and near tropics are coffee plantations. How we manage coffee plantations will likely have huge effects on tropical diversity. National Geographic just ran a story here. 

I need to get to Africa and see some birds and, damn it, I need a cup of coffee.