Week 2: A brief overview and history

This session shows the student’s community drawings, provides an overview of how to quantify ecological communities, examines some large scale patterns in ecological communities, and details a few seminal theories.

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

Lecture summary

This lecture shows the student’s community drawings, provides an overview of how to quantify ecological communities, examines some large scale patterns in ecological communities, and details a few seminal theories. Specifically, it goes through various metrics we can use to describe communities (e.g., abundance, species richness, diversity indices), sheds light on global patterns of species richness in marine systems, and uses basic simulations to highlight various ecological theories over the course of the field’s history.

Lecture slides

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

Lecture recording



Corrections

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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 ...".