Topics Covered

• Understand the concept of causal relationships and how climate can determine vegetation type.
• Appreciate the difference between the climax concept of vegetation succession and the individualistic concept.
• Recognise that biodiversity is not distributed evenly over the Earth, but is clustered into centres of diversity.
• Understand that many individual interactions can lead to apparently chaotic fluctuations.
• Gain an awareness of the 1/f power function and how it can be used to transform apparently random fluctuations into a straight line.
• Introduction to the classic Nicholson’s blow fly experiment that demonstrates density-dependent population dynamics.
• Understand that climate-driven events in human history, such as those of the Greenland Vikings and Mexican Mayans, were significantly influenced by social factors.
• Recognise that there are established physical relationships in nature such as allometric scaling.
• Gain an awareness of relationships between wealth and human social structures including the Pareto wealth distribution and environmental Kuznets curve, and the problems associated with their validity.
• Understand the difference between ecocentric and anthropocentric positions.
• Appreciate the arguments for legal rights for non-human species.
• Gain an awareness of the practical aspects of converting natural complexity into decision making in natural resource management.