Course Description

This course is required for degrees across four departments within the Warner College of Natural Resources that I team-teach each summer. The course pushes students to function in an interdisciplinary setting as they are introduced to strategies for interacting, identifying, measuring, describing, and managing different ecosystems. This is an immersive course taught of the CSU Mountain Campus to provide a hands-on experiential setting that blends lecture and field activities. Lectures are structured to introduce new concepts and are broken up through both short group and individual activities. These lectures set the stage for group field activities that challenge students to take hands-on observations of different ecosystems and then perform an analysis and interpretation of what they observed. The course culminates with a series of full day field excursions to a range of ecosystems where the students are challenged to address a real-world management concern, while address multiple resources from multiple disciplines including forestry, rangelands, wildlife, watershed, and human dimensions. Course assessment includes both field spot quizzes and exams that combine True/False, Multiple Choices, Matching, and calculations questions. Mixing multiple exam approaches is intended to assess the ability of students to consider and evaluate for multiple natural resources.