CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

Geography 640-01:
Seminar in Physical Geography
Focus: Biogeography

Exotics and Invasives, Type Conversion, Community Restoration

F/12 ticket # 5684
Th 7-9:45 p.m. in PH1-222

Instructor Information:

Instructor: Dr. C.M. Rodrigue

E-mail: rodrigue@csulb.edu

Instructor's Home Page: http://www.csulb.edu/~rodrigue

Course Home Page: https://home.csulb.edu/~rodrigue/geog640/

Office: PH1-233

Telephones: (526) 985-4895 or -8432

Mailbox: PH1-210

Office Hours: TTh 1-1:50 p.m., T 4:30-5:20 p.m., and by appointment (I may miss some Th office hours because of ES&P 400 field days)

Course Description:

Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

Physical/environmental issues and problems. May be repeated to a maximum of 6 units with consent of departmental advisor. Letter grade only (A-F).

Course Concerns:

For the last few years, Dr. Laris and I, with several GDEP interns, classes, and graduate students, have conducted research in Southern California to reverse the loss of California sage scrub (CSS) and the critical habitat it provides for several endangered birds, butterflies, small mammals, and reptiles.

We have a mass of data from Palos Verdes Peninsula, the Serrano and La Jolla valleys and other sites in the Santa Monica Mountains, and Stoney Point in the San Fernando Valley. It is high time we get this material organized, identify needs for more field and lab data collection and analysis, and get this information published and integrated into landscape management practices.

This seminar will give you a broad familiarity with these issues and previous work, get you out in the field and into the lab, and culminate in projects that can and should be presented at conferences and published. The dominant topic of emphasis is biogeography, and the seminar should appeal to graduate students with interests in biogeography, environmental science, and GIScience -- and getting out in the field -- but it may also work for graduate students in human geography and environmental policy, too, who might like to do projects on how CSS is perceived by residents and how receptive they might be to restoration projects or native plant gardening.

Course Objectives:

Upon successful completion of this course, graduate students should be able to:

• characterize the scrub vegetation associations of coastal Southern California (chaparral/hard chaparral and California sage scrub/soft chaparral/coastal sage scrub/interior sage scrub)
• characterize exotic-dominated California grassland
• understand the magnitude of CSS loss and its significance to several endangered local animal species
• define type conversion
• understand the epistemological, practical, and ethical issues surrounding restoration
• be familiar with various hypotheses about CSS persistence and regrowth, mechanisms enabling continguing exotic domination, and CSS restoration efforts, both failed and successful
• acquire practice in field and lab data collection and processing methods to test these hypotheses
• get lots of practice in data analysis and data visualization in spreadsheets, GIS, and statistical packages
• show professional research, analysis, writing, and presentation skills
• emerge with a project that can be presented at a conference (e.g., Southern California Academy of Sciences (CSULB), California Geographical Society (San Luis Obispo), Los Angeles Geographical Society (LACC), or, who knows?, a thesis topic!

Reading Materials:

Course Materials:

Readings (articles and web pages) will be assigned throughout the semester. You should be thoroughly familiar with the online-access options of our library for the majority of the readings.

Grading:

Grading is based on seminar participation, field and lab work, a research paper and presentation, and moderating discussion of a seminar reading.

The allocation of grade points is as follows:

40% = participation in seminar discussions and field/lab work
40% = research paper and presentation of its findings
20% = the seminar reading discussion you moderate

Tentative List of Topics:

• Mediterranean scrub and exotic grasslands in Southern California
• trends and issues in California sage scrub and its habitat function
• restoration issues in general and in CSS in particular
• hypotheses about CSS decline, stability, unaided restoration
• previous work at CSULB: what do we have? what do we need?
• student research, analysis, write-up
• recommendations for conservancies

Makeup Policy

Makeups are possible in the event of a documented unexpected emergency in a student's life or through prior arrangement with the instructor when the student has advance knowledge of a conflict in schedule, including jury duty or other governmental obligation; death, injury, or serious illness/caretaking responsibilities in the household or family; work-related issues; certain University sanctioned activities; or religious obligations and observances. Makeups under these circumstances will not be penalized with prior notice or documentation. Scheduling a plane flight before finals week is not a compelling conflict in schedule and will be penalized. All other makeup requests, especially those requested after the fact or unsupported by documentation, are subject to denial or serious penalty.

Withdrawal Policy

It is the student's responsibility to withdraw from classes. Instructors have no obligation to withdraw students who do not attend classes and, because of the bureaucratic difficulty involved, generally choose not to do so.

The deadline to withdraw from a class without a "W" showing up on your transcript is 10 September. You can withdraw until 10 p.m. that night through My CSULB. You can withdraw later, until 16 November, but you'll have a "W" show up on your transcript. From 16 November to 7 December, you can only withdraw for a documented serious and compelling emergency, with the approval of the dean's office, which expects that you are dropping all of your classes because of the seriousness of the emergency. Note: "I'm not doing well in this class, so I have to drop it" is not regarded as a serious and compelling emergency. Here are the various deadlines for Fall 2012: http://www.csulb.edu/depts/enrollment/dates/registration_fall.html.

Accessibility

It is the student's responsibility to let me know at the beginning of the semester if s/he has a disability that may require accommodation. I am personally committed to making my classes accessible and providing accommodations that will help everyone have the same chance at success. I need to know about the issue at the beginning of the semester, though, so that we can work out a mutually reasonable and satisfying accommodation. For more information on campus support services for disabled students, please check out http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/students2/dss.

Related to accessibility, this course will be set up on BeachBoard to enable convenient contact. You will need to have a CSULB e-mail account to use BeachBoard, however. Announcements and messages from me to the class may come by e-mail. If you do not check your CSULB e-mail account regularly but use another account instead, please set your CSULB account so that it will automatically forward messages to your other account. Alternatively, you can use web-mail to check your CSULB e-mail, the way many of you use Hotmail, Yahoo, or G-mail. The web page is http://beachmail.csulb.edu/. The CSULB Technology Help Desk is available for students, by the way. The URL for the Help Desk is http://helpdesk.csulb.edu. Their telephone number is (562) 985-4959.

Policy on Cheating and Plagiarism

Work that you hand in is assumed to be original unless your source material is documented appropriately. When in doubt, cite. Cheating and plagiarism are serious academic offenses: They represent intellectual theft. Students should read the section on cheating and plagiarism in the CSULB catalogue, which can be accessed at http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/catalog/current/academic_information/cheating_plagiarism.html. When in doubt, please ask me if you think you're getting into a grey area.

Furthermore, students should be aware that faculty members have a range of academic actions available to them in cases of cheating and plagiarism. At a minimum, At the very least, I will give a student cheating or plagiarizing on a particular assignment a failing grade on that assignment, but only if I think that there was some misunderstanding about what these offenses are; if I feel that the decision to cheat or plagiarize was intentional, I will fail a student in the course. I also may then refer the student to Judicial Affairs for possible probation, suspension, or dismissal.

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Last revised: 08/28/12
Dr. C.M. Rodrigue