Week 1: A Primer to Community Ecology

This session provides basic information about the course as taught in Spring 2025, as well as a primer to the field of community ecology.

Simon J. Brandl, PhD https://www.fishandfunctions.com/ (The University of Texas at Austin)
2025-04-17

Lecture summary

This lecture covers a basic overview of the course structure along with policies, assignments, and grading system. Furthermore, the lecture provides a short primer to community ecology. Specifically, we will explore why we care about ecological communities, what they are, and why they can be a complex subject to study.

Note: If you are working through this course independently or are re-using its materials for your own class, feel free to ignore pages 1-52.

Lecture slides

The PDF containing the slides for today’s lecture can be downloaded here.

Lecture recording



Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-NC 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/simonjbrandl/marinecommunityecology, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".