82671 - Anthropogenic Alterations, Monitoring and Management of Ecosystems

Learning outcomes

At the end of the course, the student has a good knowledge on some environmental alteration caused by human activity, of their consequences at a functional level, of the principles that underlie the methods for mitigation and restoration of habitats.

Course contents

Biodiversity
Definition of biodiversity, components of biodiversity, definition of ecosystem services.
Measuring biodiversity within ecosystems, species diversity, richness, evenness, diversity indices, accumulation and rarefaction curves, taxonomic distance, taxonomic diversity and distinctess.
Measuring biodiversity between ecosystems, alpha beta, gamma diversity.
Multivariate analysis applied to ecological data analysis, in particular to the taxonomic composition of populations, similarity measures, grouping analysis, sorting methods (multi dimensional scaling, principal component analysis).
Functional diversity.
Measuring biodiversity within species, genetic diversity.

Pollution
Toxic pollutants and ecotoxicology, tate and effect of pollutants.
Fate of pollutants in organisms, toxicokinetics, upteke, distribution, storage, metabolism (phase I and phase II), excretion, bioaccumulation, bioconcentration, biomagnification.
Effects of toxic pollutants at the molecular and cellular level, biomarkers or biomarkers.
Toxicity tests, toxicity values.
Interaction between toxic substances: additivity, potentiation (synergism) and antagonism.
Effects of toxic substances on population and community level.
Non-toxic pollutants in water, concentration of oxygen in surface waters and effect of pollutants, eutrophication, combined indices for the evaluation of the degree of pollution and trophic state.
The Lake Orta case study.

Environmental biomonitoring
Definition of environmental biomonitoring, the different approaches to environmental biomonitoring.
Characteristics of biomonitoring in comparison to chemical and physical monitoring.
Integrated approaches to environmental monitoring (weight of evidence).

The Water Framework Directive of the European Union Objectives of the directive, definition of status, chemical status, ecological status.
Chemical status: environmental quality standards and their identification.
Ecological status: biological, physico-chemical, hydromorphological quality elements.
Categories and types of water bodies, type-specific reference condition, general definition of the ecological status levels, specifice definition of the ecological status levels for the quality elemnts in rivers.
The assessment of biological quality elements: the example of the MacrOper method.
The assessment of chemical and physico-chemical elements: general elements and specific pollutants, LIMeco, LTLeco, TRIX.
The assessmentof the hydromorphological elements: the example of the Morphological Quality Index for rivers (IQM).
River basin districts and autorities.

Climate change
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its reports.
Global temperature trend from 1850 to the present, available datasets.
Reconstruction of the temperature of the last two millennia. Concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere since the late 1950s.
Past concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases based on ice core measurements.
Attribution of global warming to human activity.

 

Readings/Bibliography

Copies of the lesson slides.
Video and Audio recordings of the lectures.
Quizzes for the preparation of the written test.

Teaching methods

Lectures.
Computer classes (data analysis).
Both during the lectures and during the computer clesses student-teacher interaction and discussion between students is actively encouraged.

All activities will take place in classroom, to the extent allowed by the health situation. All the lessons and exercises will however be transmitted by videoconference for the benefit of students who will not be able to attend in classroom.

Assessment methods

The exam for the integrated course of Principles and Methods for the Environmentally Friendly Development (this course + Evaluation Tools for the Eco-Compatibility) is unified.

The exam consists of a written and an oral test.

The written test can be divided into two partials during the period of the lessons (ongoing tests).

The learning assessment aims at a complete and balanced evaluation of the degree of achievement of all the objectives defined in the "learning outcomes" section.

The written test is a quiz with multiple choice questions, open-ended questions, calculation exercises.

Oral mark will be the average of marks reported on specific questions on the different topics. The students is invited to provide answers to open questions in a relatively synthetic manner through pertinent answers, also with the help of schemes and drawings.

The final score will be the average of written and oral marks. The assessment is expressed as a grade up to thirty cum laude.

Teaching tools

Classroom with computer connected to video projector.

Office hours

See the website of Andrea Pasteris