FRS 002W — Sec. 001 — (2 units) — CRN 53265 — R 7:40-9:00 pm — 2342 Storer
Biology and Global Climate Change

Instructor: Arthur Shapiro, Department of Evolution & Ecology, Division of Biological Sciences

Description: On January 2, 2003 every major newspaper in the world gave front-page coverage to two articles published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, reporting a strong consensus that global climatic change is eliciting unexpectedly strong and rapid biological responses. One of the authors, Dr. Terry Root of Stanford University, was quoted as saying she believed a mass extinction crisis is imminent. This course will examine such claims, asking: What is “climate”? How can we recognize climatic change? What are the potential biological consequences of climatic change? What evidence do we have that it is occurring? What, if anything, should we be doing about it?

Format: The course will meet for 1.5 hours a week. There will be assigned readings and discussion of these. Each student will research a topic, using both electronic and print sources, and prepare a paper and a 15-minute talk or poster derived from the paper. At the end of the quarter there will be a “mini-symposium” at which all remaining talks and posters will be presented. There is no text; students will read papers from current literature. Grading: Students will be letter-graded based on class participation (1/3), papers (1/3), and the quality of their talk or poster (1/3).

About the Instructor: Arthur M. Shapiro has been on the UCD faculty for 31 years and is Professor of Evolution and Ecology and Entomology. He is a world authority on the biology of butterflies and initiated a monitoring program in 1972 which is now one of the two largest databases in the world on butterfly population and community dynamics. He and his graduate students are scrutinizing these data for biological “signatures” of climate change. He has taught graduate seminars on global change biology, geographical ecology, and biological responses to El Nino, and teaches upper-division course in Tropical Ecology, Community Ecology, Biogeography and Systematics. He is the author of about 250 scientific papers and numerous reviews