BI 223B Principles of Botany

Designed for Life Science majors. Topics: evolutionary trends of flowering plants, diagnostic characteristics of plant families, species distribution and community ecology interactions. Skills: explain phylogenetic relationship between plant groups, describe plant associations and species interaction in a variety of ecosystems, proficient use of botanical keys; ecological research that includes data documentation and analysis.

Credits

4

Prerequisite

BI 221 and BI 222 with a grade of C- or better or instructor consent

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
1. Provide morphological, molecular, and developmental evidence of the common ancestry of life 2. Use phylogenies to explore the evolutionary relationships among taxonomic groups
3. Describe how biotic and abiotic components of the environment shape organismal traits through the process of natural selection
4. Outline how evolutionary processes impact biodiversity
5. Explain how mutation and genetic recombination contribute to phenotypic variation in a population and predict how abiotic and biotic selective pressures can alter those populations over space and time
6. Describe how interactions between structure and function influence ecosystems at multiple scales. Explain how biotic and abiotic interactions influence and are influenced by morphological, physiological and behavioral traits
7. Generate questions and construct testable hypotheses about biological mechanisms based on observations of the natural world, design experiments using appropriate methodology, summarize results, work productively in diverse teams