NSCI 160 Environmental Biology (5 credits)
Distribution Area Fulfilled Natural Sciences with Lab; General Transfer Elective
Course Description
Interrelationship of humans, animals, plants, soil, water and air. Application to contemporary environmental problems.
Student Outcomes
1. Identify contagious diseases that plague life on earth, and how they can be “eliminated”.
2. Identify the term “poverty”, its complications and causes, and the various ways to eliminate it.
3. Define the thoughts behind and the underlying hypothesis of Gaia.
4. Be able to relay, through layperson understandings, introductory chemistry functions/terms (ex. atom, bonds, macromolecules, water properties).
5. Demonstrate awareness of the environment, biomes, and ecosystems the students inhabit on this vast planet (in the biosphere sense), and the niche they fill as responsible inhabitants.
6. Demonstrate increased awareness of ecological principles and their importance to current human affairs.
7. Correctly use basic techniques for detecting the individuality of an ecosystem as a basis of perceiving environmental changes.
8. Define the two laws of thermodynamics and apply them to the fundamental operation of food webs and communities and approaches in solving an ecological crisis.
9. Define the fundamental structures and functions of a food web, food pyramid, and trophic levels.
10. Differentiate between environmentally editorialized and scientifically objective printed and verbal stands through the media.
11. Identify and contrast between the major ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest (land, sea, freshwater, and brackish water).
12. Identify and contrast between the major biomes of the Pacific Northwest and Earth.
13. Trace the natural cycles of planet Earth in the earth’s three abiotic components: hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, with applications to human involvement.
14. Explain the process of population / fertility control, growth, and extinction, and apply these processes to approach the current, past, and future potential population problems of the various biota of Earth (Humans included).
15. Discuss key issues concerning social problems and potential solutions with water, land, agricultural, economic, and air management topics via environmental concerns.
16. Identify and define pollution via its causes, its’ effects (primary and secondary) in current, past, and future concerns/repercussions with both earth’s abiotic, and biotic areas.
17. Identify the potential causes and repercussions of global warming.
18. Identify key government and social environmental causes/groups which influence environmental concerns.
19. Describe who Rachel Carson is and expand upon her importance to the field of environmental science.
20. Identify means of recycling, waste management, and environmental responsibility issues pertaining to clean up techniques.
21. Identify personal habitats “artificial” to the earth (home, school, work), and their local ecosystems that they and the human built structures (housing highways, autos, etc.) influenced through both positive and negative means.
22. Differentiate between the terms: endemic, introduced and native, pertaining to flora and fauna, and the effects of introduced organisms to an ecosystem.
23. Describe and identify differences between the domains and kingdoms of life on earth.
24. Differentiate between the terms developed and undeveloped nations/countries.
25. Describe the structure and function of DNA. Use this understanding to explain the use of genetically modified foods on the earth, what they are, and what repercussions of their use may have.
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