EKO/ESE Community Ecology and Ecosystems

Lecturer: Tomáš Kuras
Lecture: 2 hours/week + exercise 1 hour/week
Credits: 4
Summer semester
Form of course completion: exam

Actual trends in community ecology, terminology, change of ecology paradigms. Biological complexity. The nature of communities (concepts, community boundaries, key-stone species, dominants, Gaia hypothesis). Community structure (diversity, species richness, diversity indexes, model of species-abundance relations, communities in space and time, models of succession, climax state, theoretical nonequilibrium models, conceptual models of community organisation). Essential statistical methods for community analysis (ordination, gradient analysis, classification). Biodiversity (local, regional and global biodiversity, spatial heterogeneity, biodiversity gradients, role of disturbance in community, S-A relationship, theory of island biogeography, Rapoport`s rule, macroecological patterns). Stability of communities (connectance, resilience, resistence, conventional attitude). Ecosystems (concepts, primary & secondary production, nutrient cycling, energy flow, food chains and webs). Nutrient cycles (N, C, S, P, H2O, monitoring methods, human impact on cycles).

• ekosystem and its criticism
• biodiversity and ecosystem functioning
• neutral theory of biodiversity
• community structure and rank-abundance models
• importance and applicability of the Jackknife, bootsrap and rarefaction methods
• coexistence of species in communities
• analytical successional models (Markovian and Horn succesional models)
• environmental variability and Milankovitch cycles
• biodiversity limited factors
• global gradients of biodiversity