How might an understanding of human-wildlife conflicts shape our approach to disease, ecology, and conservation? Should we care that we are losing wildlife, like bats? Across the globe, human societies have significantly harmed bat populations both intentionally and unintentionally. This course will delve into different bat population crisis causes as well as current and potential solutions, while addressing complex human-wildlife conflicts that need to be considered while solving them. During the course, students will get hands-on experience using highly sophisticated bat acoustic technology to identify bats to species-level. Lecture and discussion sections will focus on bat ecology, management techniques, newest bat identification techniques, data interpretation, and scientific presentation skills.

Examines how humans are affected by the quality of our air, water, soil and food supply as well as how human activities alter these survival necessities. Students will learn how the evolution and prosperity of human populations have resulted in degradation of our environment and the impact of environmental degradation on the health of people. The implications of individual and collective choices for sustainable food production, population management, and resource utilization will be explored.

Ecotechnology innovation is taught with design thinking, which uses an iterative cycle of developing customer empathy, learning ecological technology, appreciating environmental stewardship, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, user experience, testing and redesign. Environment entrepreneurship is based on the Lean Startup process, which uses customer discovery, encourages quick product development, reduces start-up costs, tests ideas quickly, and employs designed experiments. A multidisciplinary academic setting embraces designing, building, testing and marketing novel technologies that enhance the environmental needs of humans. Students will learn in an active environment that requires working creatively, collaboratively, diligently, and precisely to create a business model and tangible prototype for a new commercial product.

The study of ecology has a long and interesting history, from early society's efforts to understand and alter their environment as a matter of survival to the challenges the modern world is facing that are global in scale. Through the course text, distributed supplemental chapter readings and an understanding of the scientific literature, this course will cover the essential concepts and principles of ecosystem ecology as well as its history and past and present controversies. Several of the basic methods and tools of field research and the applied management of ecosystems will be discussed and demonstrated with several field excursions in the natural environs of the DC area. Central to this course will be the understanding that modern human society is an integral part of nature, with the power to impact and influence elements of the natural world at multiple scales. An analysis of policy implications for the biosphere will be discussed.