This module will provide students with an understanding of the function of plant meristems and their role in plant primary and secondary growth. In addition, the students will be introduced to plant flowering and reproduction, seedling formation, and various aspects of plant growth regulation controls including environment, photoperiodism, hormones, phytochromes.
Having successfully completed the module, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- Plant meristems and their role in plant growth
- Plant primary and secondary growth of vegetative organs
- Plant flowering and reproduction,
- Germination and development of seedlings
- Plant growth response and regulation
The module will provide students with basic theoretical and practical knowledge and skills to implement a Geographic Information System (GIS) project: basic concepts, tools and methods to capture, store, query, analyze, display and output spatial data (geo-information, basic processes of remote sensing) with focus on biodiversity conservation.
The aim of this module is to equip students with skills that help them strengthen their observational and critical thinking about the inter-links between living organisms and their surrounding environment with a focus on climate change, its causes and impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems and humans. Students will also learn how to mitigate and adapt to climate change and the role of research in achieving sustainable mitigation and adaptation.
Having successfully completed the module, students should be able to
demonstrate knowledge and understanding of:
- Climate change: the science of climate change, and the body of evidence
- Impacts of climate change globally and locally
- Impacts of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
- Adaptation and mitigation strategies
- Climate resilience
- Global policies and multilateral agreements on Climate change and Biodiversity
- Local policies and strategies on climate change and Biodiversity
- Research agenda for monitoring biodiversity and climate change
This course explores the manipulation of nucleic acids and demonstrates how gene-level understanding can help answer biological questions, using Recombinant DNA Technology as a key tool.
Indicative content:
- Transformation
- Gene Expression
The module aims at providing a deep understanding of early stages of development in metazoans through different models and illustrate their different stages for comparison purpose.
Animal growth on its side shows processes of growth, internal and external factors influencing growth in animals
The aim of the Tropical Ecology module is to provide students with a strong foundational skills in Tropical Ecology. The tropics harbor the richest ecosystems in plants and animals diversity, but also the most diverse genomes, clades of higher taxa (e.g. Willig et al., 2003; Lomolino et al., 2010). Learning will mainly focus on tropical ecosystems diversity, structure and functioning. Ecosystems of interest include Forests, coral reefs, mangroves and costal zones, montane ecosystems, wetlands and peatbogs, inselbergs, savannahs and deserts. Ecological processes that explain the biodiversity distribution and adaptation as well as human factors are key to understand the current biodiversity pattern on earth. Students will particularly be able to develop an clear appreciation and understanding of the ecology and conservation of the ecosystems studied.
The module provides opportunities for students to develop the ability to weigh the claims made by scientists against the evidence. This will be a writing-intensive course. Students will have ample opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the topic, and their fluency in expressing themselves through writing, throughout the module.
The goal is to cover the fundamentals of tropical ecology, including key habitat features, biodiversity, ecological processes and biotic interactions; to provide first-hand experience of ecological research in the tropics, through group exercises and short independent projects and to evaluate the anthropogenic impacts on tropical ecosystems and consider the current conservation and forest management practices.
To be more specific the Students will:
- Understand the main patterns of tropical vegetation and how this
drives animal distribution
- Have an insight in the processes that generate and maintain
biodiversity in the tropics
- Understand the role of climate change and climate variability of vegetation and animal population dynamic and associated possible changes in relation with global warming under the tropics
- Understand the role of humans in historical and future changes in
tropical forest ecosystems
- Have an understanding of theoretical ecology in explaining community
composition in tropical forests