Getting Down to Business- Teaching

Today is the the first day of orientation for incoming first year students. Classes start next week which means that it is probably time for me to figure out what I am going to teach. I am assigned to teach "Special Topics in Ecology and Biodiversity" for upper level students in the Program in Ecology and Biodiversity (PEB). The course will meet for only one hour per week, so it should have much more of a seminar feel to it than a traditional lecture course.

I have decided that the purpose of this course will be to compare aspects of organismal biology, ecology, and biodiversity of temperate ecosystems in the US with that of tropical ecosystems in Malaysia. Hopefully, organizing the course in this way will allow me to use my experience in temperate regions and force me to learn a lot more about tropical ecology.

Its "Learning Time"!!
I can already hear you asking- "how are tropical ecosystems different from temperate ecosystems?" so let me try to tell you.

There are lots of ways of classifying ecological communities. One approach that has proven to be quite useful is to divide the earth into "ecoregions". According to the WWF (the World Wide Fund for Nature, previoulsy the World Wildlife Fund), a “an ecoregion is a relatively large unit of land that contains geographically distinct assemblage of natural communities with boundaries that approximate the original extent of natural communities prior to major land use change.” WWF scientists have divided the earth into 867 terrestrial ecoregions (. Because of the of the global scope of the WWF ecoregion project,WWF ecoregions can be useful units for comparing between different geographic regions.

Ecoregions of Texas
According to WWF, there 12 ecoregions occur in the state of Texas.

1) Sierra Madre Occidental pine-oak forests
2) East central Texas forests
3) Arizona Mountains forest
4) Piney Woods forests
5) West Gulf coast grasslands
6) Central and Southern mixed grasslands
7) Central forest-grassland transition
8) Edwards Plateau savanna
9) Texas Blackland Prairies
10) Western short grasslands
11) Chihuahuan deseret
12) Tamaulipan mezquital

Texas ecoregions can be broadly classified into three types- forests, savannas & grasslands, and deserts. The dominant plant types of ecoregions in Texas are pines, oaks, grasses, and desert shrubs.

Ecoregions of Malaysia
According to WWF, 11 ecoregions are found in Malaysia.

1) Borneo Lowland Rain Forests
2) Borneo Montane Rain Forests
3) Borneo Peat Swamp Forests
4) Kinabalu Montane Alpine Meadows
5) Myanmar Coast Mangroves
6) Peninsular Malaysian Montane Rain Forests
7) Peninsular Malaysian Peat Swamp Forests
8) Peninsular Malaysian Rain Forests
9) South China Sea Islands
10) Sunda Shelf Mangroves
11) Tenasserim-South Thailand Semi-evergreen Rain Forests

Malaysian ecoregions basically fall into two categories - forests and mangroves. The dominant plant types of Malaysian ecoregions are dipterocarps (much more on dipterocarps to come later), other broad leaf tropical trees, and mangroves.

Big Question
The big question we need to answer is "what is it about the environments of Texas and Malaysia that produce such different types of ecoregions?"