Tropical Conservation and Resource Management
NRE 353 / Environ 353
Credits: 4
Prerequisites: Students are strongly recommended to have previously taken an ecology course.

This is a multidisciplinary course that will examine the underlying problems of conservation and natural resource management in the tropics. Ecological aspects as well as socio/political and economic ones will be discussed. The first two weeks will consist of a review of basic ecological principles, but with an emphasis on how those principles relate to the conservation and management of renewable resouces. The next part of the course will examine the complexity of social, political and economic factors that interact with environmental ones to limit, enhance, or somehow affect the conservation and management of resources. Finally, the last, but more extensive, part of the course will examine various tropical ecosystems, their ecology and management and the challenge that their consevation represents. An emphasis will be placed on the interactions between conservation and development and on the perspective of the people of the Third World, since most tropical countries are part of the Third World.