Teaching
The teaching of our Department represents the areas of freshwater and animal ecology in the Bachelor's and Master's degree programs in Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning. In the Master's program, the focus is on courses in the specialization Environmental Planning and Landscape Management (ULM). The study program is based on potential tasks in professional life. In addition to general basic courses in ecology and identification exercises on various taxonomic groups, we cover topics such as planning restoration of aquatic systems, as well as the comparative application of various assessment methods for freshwater bodies and floodplains. In this context, the knowledge and analysis of the occurrence of indicator organisms (e.g. invertebrates, fish, birds) plays an important role, which is taken into account in various courses.
In addition to joint courses with other ASL departments (particulary within the ULM specialization) there are thematic links to other faculties at the University of Kassel, such as Faculty 14 (Civil and Envirometal Engineering) and Faculty 11 (Organic Agriculture Sciences). Cross-disciplinary courses aim to identify interfaces and create synergies between these fields.
Regular courses (compulsory elective)
The aim of the course is to practise the independent identification of aquatic invertebrates from the common families, but also to gain initial experience of the significance of anthropogenic influences such as structural quality of streams on the occurrence of individual taxa. In the course of this, the recognition of relevant characteristics at various taxonomic levels is systematically rehearsed. This will demonstrate the importance of the animal group as an indicator for water body assessment.
In this course, bird species and songs (especially territorial songs) are studied in typical habitats at various locations in urban and suburban areas directly in the field. The seasonality of territorial songs and the occurrence of different bird species depending on the preferred habitat characteristics are also considered.
Statistical analyses of environmental data are of central importance in numerous scientific and planning areas. Among other things, it is used to evaluate e.g. management measures and derive further conclusions. In addition to the actual handling of data, this also requires knowledge of mathematical principles (e.g. frequency distributions) and the application of statistical tests using suitable software. Using sample data sets, participants practise both the operation of R (and RStudio as a possible user interface) and the application of various statistical methods.
In this course, students learn various methods for in freshwater and floodplain ecology in the field by own data collection, which are particularly important for the assessment and deficit analysis of freshwater systems. By scientific analysis of collected data, (1) potential restoration measures will be derived examplarily and (2) scientific questions arising from the data will be developed.