“Field Course in Biodiversity Assessment and Monitoring” (UWW210)
August 14th to 19th 2022 – Empächli, Elm (Canton of Glarus)
Info Day: May 24th 2022 12:30-13:15 via Zoom
Lecturers: Dr. Roman Alther, Prof. Dr. Florian Altermatt, Prof. Dr. Owen Petchey
For more information and registration, please contact Claudia Hegglin claudia.hegglin@ieu.uzh.ch
Goals of the course
As a typical alpine location, Empächli/Elm is characterized by diverse alpine ecosystems such as snowfields, rock surfaces, meadows, pastures, forests, lake, wetlands, or bogs, which are right at the doorstep and will be visited during the week.
The overall aim of the course is to give an introduction into the assessment and analysis of biodiversity patterns. These skills are a prerequisite for many basic and applied research questions dealing with biodiversity. In the field, you will learn how to identify plant species and assess associated trait measures. Participants will further learn various techniques of invertebrate sampling. Subsequently, students will identify the collected invertebrates in the laboratory and analyse the data.
Content of the course
For practical purposes, the most urgent need in protecting biodiversity is to assess how biodiversity is distributed in space and how it changes over time. Because biodiversity is not homogeneously distributed, its measurement is difficult and requires a multitude of tools and methods. For example, flowering plants may easily be counted but butterflies are constantly moving and may be hard to see when a site is being visited. Different groups of invertebrates, which play an important role in all ecosystem and food webs, must be collected with specific means (e.g., transect counts, pit falls, light traps, kicknetting) and identified appropriately. Good statistical design of assessment and monitoring programs maximizes accuracy for a given cost.
This field course will give you firstly an introduction into a highly diverse alpine ecosystem with the goal of learning the most important species and species groups and secondly a practical overview on how to assess biodiversity for different taxonomic groups.
By the end of the course, you should:
Be able to plan, conduct and present small research projects on current topics in ecology and biodiversity sciences.
Know and have applied different field techniques to monitor biodiversity of different taxa (such as terrestrial insects, plants, aquatic invertebrates).
Be familiar with the most important aspects of planning and conducting biodiversity monitoring.
Have a first overview on the faunistics and identification of some of the characteristic species of a few major taxonomic organismal groups (such as plants, butterflies, aquatic invertebrates) and be able to represent this knowledge in a field note book.
https://www.biol.uzh.ch/wp_docs/Field_Course_UWW210_Aug2022.pdf
