We live in a highly interconnected world. It’s nearly impossible to imagine the scale and pace at which we are moving people and things around the planet. With such high rates of global trade and travel come some serious costs, among them breakdown of dispersal barriers and the global movement of “nonnative” species all over the world. Many thousands of species have been introduced (in some cases intentionally) and have established and spread, in some cases becoming major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem function as well as to human health and welfare. The management of invasive species is also extremely expensive, with direct and indirect costs reaching the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Still, our global economy and agricultural systems are deeply dependent on the movement of products and cultivation of species that originated elsewhere, and even some accidental invaders can benefit local economies and ecosystems in a variety of complex (and sometimes controversial) ways. From a pure science perspective, the phenomenon of biological invasion also represents a powerful suite of natural experiments that afford the opportunity to study and better understand drivers of species diversity, coexistence, and community assembly, as well as key evolutionary principles.
This course explores some of the major (and hopefully fun) aspects of invasion biology via in-depth discussions the primary literature.
Graduate students only.
