250078 VU Modeling in evolutionary ecology (2016S)

This course will introduce topics in ecology and evolution and teach students the skills to formally address relevant problems in biology. The course is structured as a combination of lectures and integrated exercises. Students will learn to construct mathematical models that describe the dynamics and interactions of processes in ecological and evolutionary systems. The course will introduce the simulation procedures, the adaptive dynamics framework, the separation-of-time-scales technique and other methods used in model analysis. The students will practice implementing these methods using the Mathematica software introduced during the course and interpreting the results. The course will progress from classical topics in population genetics to contemporary investigation in the evolution of genetic variance, joint population dynamics and evolution, and mechanisms for species coexistence and the maintenance of diversity.