BIOS 615: ECOLOGY
Review Paper: The course also requires that each participant must submit a
review paper that follows the theme of, "The logistic equation in
ecology: history, uses and abuses" This paper
should follow the style and content of papers in the journal Ecological
Monographs and it should
be double spaced, 12pt font (either Times/Times Roman or Helvetica/Arial) and
at least 10 pages long, excluding the Literature Cited and any figures you may use (see Ecological
Monographs 64(1): 110-112 (1994) for Instructions to
Authors).
This review paper must be handed in no later than Thursday, 7
April 2005. Of course you are very welcome to hand
it in earlier and you are also welcome to discuss it with Steve Malcolm and
submit a draft before final submission.
This
paper will be marked critically as though you were submitting it for
publication. As a recent editor of
an international journal I will use the same criteria for judging your paper. It should be readable, grammatically
correct (also use a spelling checker) and must be word-processed. The source of figures used must be
fully acknowledged and plagiarism must be avoided absolutely (any evidence of
plagiarism will result in a score of zero). You may make this review very general with an emphasis on
history, or mathematics, or biological concepts; or you may focus on a single
problem or phenomenon. For
example, if you have a biomedical interest you may wish to compare the use of
the Michaelis-Menten-Holling
equation for the description of enzyme kinetics with its use to describe the foraging behavior
of predators, parasites or herbivores, and subsequent incorporation into the
logistic relationship. Or you may
wish to focus on the disease dynamics of HIV infections, or the dynamics of
medfly populations in California, or how to describe whale populations, or the
dynamics of harvested fish populations, or model moose-wolf interactions on
Isle Royale, or lynx-grouse-hare interactions in Northern Canada, or assess the
impact of Bt corn
pollen on monarch butterfly populations in the field, or discuss whether
populations actually show density-dependent, logistic limitation, etc.
Please include all sources in your paper and make sure that you have at least 10 primary sources of information. Primary sources are peer-reviewed journal articles (not magazines, books or web sources).
Grading
rubric for the review paper is as follows:
|
(1) Content and presentation
(general overview) |
20 points |
|
(2) Structure (hypotheses, logic of
organization, significance of argument) |
30 points |
|
(3) Interest (use of sources,
innovative arguments, use of figures) |
20 points |
|
(4) Relevance of topic to the
logistic equation |
20 points |
|
(5) References |
10 points |
|
Total |
100 points |