FRS 003 — Sec. 018 — (1 unit) — CRN 53626 — W 2:10-4:00pm — 1011 EU III
Pollution and Population Dynamics

Instructor: Tim Ginn, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering

Description: The proposed course would introduce students to the effects of pollution or contamination occurrence on the health, fitness, and changes (both short- and long-term) of populations. To this end the course content would include:

  1. An introduction to a basic catalogue of environmental contaminants,
  2. A primer on the dynamics of populations both wildlife and human, including: growth, reproduction, mortality, predation, motion, and health, and
  3. Cases where the former affects the latter, including for instance the effect of contaminants on disease outbreaks in human populations, of organic chemicals on marine fishes and mammals such as orca, of stormflow runoff on shellfish, and of temperature on coral reefs.


The goals of the class for student learning are a basic grasp of the ways that environmental stressors impact ecosystems, and conceptual models of how the resulting dynamics behave. By integrating these items the student is exposed to coupled, often nonlinear, dynamics in environmental biotic/abiotic "mixtures." This is intended to bring an awareness that encourages quantitative thinking about challenging societal problems that are both relevant and topical, including the societal impacts of contaminant placement, the effects of anthropogenic pollutants on wildlife populations and ecosystem dynamics, and environmental consequences of global warming.

Format: The seminar will consist of 9 meetings. In meeting 1, four separate topical focal problems will be chosen for study. The remaining 8 meetings will focus on each of the four topics in series, two meetings per topic. The first of the pair of meetings will involve lecture and dialogue with students as we introduce the problem, and will close with assignment of students to three groups responsible respectively for: a. physics/chemistry of stressor occurrence, b. (micro)biology of affected population within an ecosystem context, and c. coupled dynamics and implications for human management. The second of the pair of meetings will consist of short reports (~5-10 pages typed single space, plus oral presentation) from groups responsible for items a., b., and c. respectively. This approach requires reading and short report generation in four installments during the quarter. Grading: Grading will be distributed uniformly over the student's performance on each of the four projects, 25% each. Performance measures include contribution to report preparation, and classroom participation and discussion.

About the Instructor: Professor Ginn received his undergraduate degrees in Classics and Hydrology from the University of Virginia and his graduate degrees in hydrogeology from Purdue University Civil Engineering. Before joining the UCD faculty in 1996, Dr. Ginn was employed as a senior research scientist at Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory PNNL in Richland, Washington. He develops models of reactive transport of multicomponent environmental mixtures with abiotic and biotic components in natural and engineered environments.