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Browse materialsMIT 12.517 · Spring 2000

Dynamics of Complex Systems: Complexity in Ecology

Art: http://www.geographicus.com/mm5/cartographers/dop…, Tabula Selenographica in qua Lunarium Macularum exacta Descriptio…, 1707 · Public domain

Instructor: Prof. Daniel Rothman
Term: Spring 2000
Level: Graduate
What's inside: 1 reading · 3 web pages
Materials open: MIT OCW

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Source: MIT OpenCourseWare 12.517 Dynamics of Complex Systems: Complexity in Ecology, Spring 2000, Prof. Daniel Rothman — original course page on ocw.mit.edu ↗. License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Study order: MIT's own listing order, section by section. Taken from MIT's published course files, downloaded from ocw.mit.edu on September 23, 2026. How RedLectern is built.

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MIT OpenCourseWare, Prof. Daniel Rothman, 12.517 Dynamics of Complex Systems: Complexity in Ecology, Spring 2000.

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Edition: Spring 2000 · Open the original course on OCW ↗

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Dynamics of Complex Systems: Complexity in Ecology

Before you start

What's here, and what isn't

Materials by section

Assignments

Lecture 1: How many Species are there on Earth?

Lecture 2: Introduction to Food Webs and Trophic Interactions

Lecture 3: Empirical Examples and Critiques of the Cascade Model

Lecture 4: Dynamical Models of Food Webs

Lecture 5: What is the Relationship Between Complexity and Stability?

Lecture 6: Evidence from Experiments

Lecture 7: Diversity Stability Relationships: Statistical Inevitability or Ecological Consequence?

Lecture 8: Diversity in Terrestrial Ecosystems

Lecture 9: Perspectives on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function

Lecture 10: Island Biogeography

Lecture 11: Theoretical Foundation: Log-normal Distributions of Species Abundance Power-law Species-area Curves

Lecture 12: Spatial Models

Lecture 13: What is the Role of Resource Availability in Species-area Relationships?

Lecture 14: Empirical Tests of Species-energy Theory

Lecture 15: Issues of Scale

Lecture 16: Extinction Rates and Range Contraction of Endangered Species

Lecture 17: Introduction to Body Size in the Context of Evolution and Ecology

Lecture 18: Allometric Constraints, Resource Equipartitioning and Body Size

Lecture 19: Cope’s Rule

Lecture 20: Home Range Scaling and Statistical Artifacts in Abundance Sampling

Lecture 21: Evolutionary Entropy and Body Size