Field Botany for Ecological Surveys
Overview
- Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
- Convenor and tutor: Dr Steven Dodsworth
- Assessment: a one-hour online quiz (10%), two-hour practical test (45%) and t2000-word field report (45%)
Module description
Ecological surveys require a detailed understanding of plants present in order to classify vegetation. This module equips you with the necessary grounding in field botany required to undertake ecological surveys, an increasingly important skill for environmental careers. The module will include practical coverage of the major groups of plants found in the British flora, culminating in the botanical survey of a field site and writing an industry-standard ecological report.
Indicative syllabus
- Preliminary ecological appraisals and UK legislative frameworks
- Vegetation survey techniques
- Plant life histories and seasonal context
- Trees and shrubs, including gymnosperms
- Mosses and ferns
- Monocots: petaloid/other; rushes and sedges; grasses
- Early angiosperms, early eudicots, Caryophyllales
- Eudicots: Asterids
- Eudicots: Rosids
Learning objectives
By the end of this module, you will be able to:
- describe the key diagnostic characters for all of the main land plant groups
- describe the key characters of the most common angiosperm plant families
- critically assess the identification process of more difficult taxa including hybrids
- critically interpret the biodiversity of a site based on accurate classification of vegetation types and constituent taxa
- evaluate the relative conservation importance of sites based on ecological survey data
- identify the majority of British flora to at least order or family level, without reference materials
- identify plants to species level using keys and other resources, including taxonomically difficult groups such as Asteraceae
- work in a team to effectively collect and collate ecological survey data
- plan and present work professionally to industry standards.