Teaching material in this course aims at giving second year students a general introduction to the integrated biological and environmental aspects of life on earth with a focus on ecology and conservation. It will highlight some of the key issues with the contemporary world, and how solutions may be found. Throughout the class there will be a focus on the relationships between biological and non-biological components of ecosystems and on the effects of human activity on the biosphere, including, but not limited, to the effects on biodiversity, climate change sustainability and water availability.
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Year Taken: AY 19/20, Sem 2
Grade: B+Favourite course of the semester for an Eco kid! Not sure if I did well though because of the bell-curve AGAIN. Biosphere is taught by Prof Kelly Andersen, Tropical ecologist and a super friendly lecturer that lifted our spirits despite the ongoing pandemic. Instead of learning by topic, the course is structured more or less according to the geological timescales, starting from the origins of life all the way to biomes and population dynamics. Prof Kelly shared lots of interesting case studies and personal anecdotes, which may sometimes be a little excessive. So, remember to extract the important points/lesson objectives throughout the lectures.
Tutorials
Standard “Homework” at the end of the week, where you have to apply what you learnt on a case study. We even had an assignment to come up with a meme/tik tok on Energy flow in ecosystems (sadly a slightly less interesting topic) when Prof Kelly felt that our morales were low due to the quarantine measures.Midterms 1 (30%) | Estimated: 60th percentile
A 2-hour open-booked online quiz with 6 questions (and parts of course) which was impossible to finish. Last year’s paper had 5 questions but I think Prof Kelly wanted minimal referencing so she added one more question. I had the concepts at the back of my head, but I guess my downfall was when I took too much time developing my answers.Racket-tailed Drongo, look at the beautiful tail hanging below!
Midterms 2 + Field Trip (30%)
Yet another field-trip, this time to Kent Ridge Park for some field surveys. The class was split up into teams to collect data for their respective type of organism. I joined the birds group so I could take photos which didn’t happen in the end because my zoom lens wasn’t powerful enough :(. It was a pretty enriching experience seeing how seasoned ecologist could identify the species just by sound while the rest if us were just fumbling with the binoculars.We then had to analyse the datasets collected during the field-trip as part of midterms 2 (aka finals). Turns out, the results were completely opposite from what you would expect to collect from a secondary forest like Kent Ridge, so the whole class had a hard time trying to explain this phenomenon. Either nature somehow revived due to the pandemic or we just sucked at collecting data LOL.
This review was published with the kind permission of Roy. Originally published at https://djtangent.wordpress.com/2020/05/15/eess-y1s2-2020/
June 30, 2021
