This subject aims to provide students with the skills to undertake and critically evaluate environmental risk assessments. Students will learn a range of qualitative and quantitative tools from a variety of disciplines, and apply them to environmental risk problems. Students completing this subject should be familiar with the concept of exposure pathways; understand the ecological processes associated with contamination in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; be able to develop empirical models; estimate exposures and responses in ecological systems; and develop a critical understanding of methodologies used in environmental risk assessment.

Topics include the concepts of risk assessment, psychology and history of risk perception, Australian standards for risk assessment, risk assessment frameworks, exposure pathways, hazard assessment, casual and empirical modeling, inference from data, endpoints and management goals, interval arithmetic, logic trees, environmental toxicology, decision-making under risk and uncertainty, social context of risk, and risk management.

The subject includes methods of hypothesis development, experimental design and testing in environmental impact assessment, design and analysis of sampling and monitoring programs and their subsequent analysis, and evaluating proposed solutions for their technical feasibility and risk.

This subject provides a detailed knowledge of vegetation structure and natural values of Victorian plant communities and their assessment, including environmental limiting factors, threats due to land use, development and fragmentation, and management issues related to environmental impact assessment and conservation of native vegetation. The subject will be based around short excursions to examine different vegetation types in the Melbourne region, and a series of special lectures by scientists, managers and consultants from both the government and private sectors. Topics will include:

• ecology and natural history of Victorian plant communities;
• environmental impacts and vegetation assessment;
• conservation and management issues (e.g. revegetation, rare species, fauna habitat, weed invasions);
• biodiversity legislation and government agencies;
• consulting services and client focus.

Applied Ecology is the science of understanding and managing ecosystems. The subject describes and evaluates the applications of ecological concepts for the conservation and management of natural and human-altered ecosystems. In particular, it identifies the implications of global and local changes for ecosystems, communities and individual species, especially within the Australian environment. It examines approaches to management and conservation of terrestrial resources and ecosystems, the control of pest species, and restoration of modified habitats.

This subject explores the relevance of ecological and evolutionary theory for understanding the distributions of species, their interactions, their life history characteristics and how these traits are impacted by changing environmental conditions. Topics include spatial ecology and metapopulations, climatic impacts on distribution and abundance, life history evolution and ecosystem stability and resilience. The skills developed in this subject provide an essential grounding for careers in ecology.

The oceans cover 71% of the earth’s surface and are vital to the well being of humans in many ways. This subject covers our current understanding of the biology of marine organisms and how marine scientists assess environmental impacts, manage exploited species and conserve biodiversity.

This subject explores and evaluates green infrastructure technologies, including green roofs, green walls, green facades and water-sensitive urban design installations. Students study the underpinning science that supports these technologies and their use in urban environments to achieve environmental, social and economic outcomes, including plant ecology, horticulture, hydrology and the science of growing media including soils and green-roof substrates. There is a strong emphasis on understanding the functions of different design systems and the engineering applications of green infrastructure in landscape and building installations. The subject also uses case studies, field visits and industry practitioners to investigate, analyse and evaluate green infrastructure technologies and systems.

Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in an increasingly urbanised world. This subject will introduce students to urban ecology and landscape ecology concepts and illustrate how they can be applied to plan and design more ecologically sustainable human landscapes. Topics include the concept of scale in ecology, land transformation and habitat fragmentation, the structure and components of landscapes, patterns and processes along urban-rural gradients, the impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity and strategies to mitigate them.

At a global scale forests are managed by societies in a wide range of ways for goods and services that reflect the needs of people and their aspirations for the environment. Forests are viewed and valued by society in many different ways, often in competition with each other, adding significant challenges to those that are entrusted to manage them. Forest Systems explores the complexity of managing the forests of Australia and around the world through case studies and real world scenarios that will help students develop a strong appreciation of the challenges and opportunities presented to those looking after forests and the stakeholders who value them. Starting with gaining an understanding of what a forest is, how it is valued and by whom, as well as how it grows, the complexity of its management is explored through the themes of water, fire, carbon, biodiversity, conservation, recreation and climate change. Field trips to explore first hand challenges faced by forest managers as well as interviews with industry partners will bring a real life context to the learning and build problem solving and decision making skills through practice. Field investigations culminate in two day overnight excursion to the Creswick campus where students will work on a major project exploring a local forest issue and make recommendations on how to proceed.

This subject imparts detailed knowledge on the crucial role that urban forests are playing in the development and resilience of sustainable cities around the world, using both local and international case studies. It begins by exploring the unique composition of urban forests, and the multiple social and ecological drivers that shape them in the context of global environmental change. This includes extreme biotic and abiotic stressors, such as changing pests and pathogens, fundamental plant physiology principles of drought, heat, light and pollution tolerance. The benefits that the urban forest generate for fauna habitat and biodiversity, human health and wellbeing, nature connectedness, microclimate cooling, and improved hydrology and water quality are discussed and analysed in detail. Finally, the subject brings these themes together through an urban landscape management lens to explore practical approaches to building our future urban forests through remote sensing, modelling ecosystem service values, and community engagement and participation. A central theme will be planning and managing urban forests for environmental equity, multiple social values and ecological outcomes in a contested urban landscape.

This subject examines principles in the two disciplines of hydrology and ecology, emphasising the application of both to understand how to solve environmental management problems in river ecosystems. The subject examines water in terms of quantity and quality; and the physical channel and floodplain systems in which it is conveyed and stored, along with transported materials such as sediments and organic matter. The subject also examines population, community and ecosystem dynamics of riverine organisms and their geographical distributions and diversities. Through practicals and fieldwork, students should develop skills in acquiring, analysing and presenting hydrological and ecological data, and in the identification and proper field sampling of stream biota. Students should become aware of the multidisciplinary nature of environmental management and the need for critical examination of ideas in the literature.

Fire is one of the most important controls over the distribution of vegetation on Earth. This subject examines the role of fire in natural systems, with a particular emphasis on the importance of fire in determining global vegetation patterns and dynamics over long periods of time. The aim is to understand how terrestrial systems have evolved to cope with and exploit fire, and to place the extreme flammability Australia's vegetation within a global context. The subject will examine concepts such as resilience, positive feedback loops, hysteresis and alternative stable states. The use of fire by humans to manipulate environments will be examined, with a particular emphasis on the variety of approaches employed by people across a diversity of environments over long periods of time, allowing an exploration of the social and cultural dynamics of fire and environmental management. A field excursion in Tasmania will visit a number of sites which will exemplify the subject themes. The practical exercises leading up to the field trip will focus on how to gather fire-related ecological data. The practical exercises following the field trip will be devoted to processing, analysing, interpreting and reporting on the field data. At the end of the subject, students will have gained an understanding of the way in which fire has shaped natural systems, as well as acquiring the skills necessary to formulate and test hypotheses.

More information about the subject and field trip can be seen at: http://michaelsresearch.wordpress.com/GEOG30025/

The estimated additional cost of the 7 day field trip to Cradle Mountain, Tasmania, is in the vicinity of $750.

Note this subject may be taken as the Capstone subject in the Geography major of the BA and BSc. All students, whether they are capstone students or not, will be required to complete online introductory materials that are common across all field classes.

Geomicrobiology and biogeochemistry involve the study of interactions across interfaces of minerals, water, and microbes, and how such interactions impact environmental conditions and reflect evolution. This subject will survey the fundamental principles of geomicrobiology and biogeochemistry, explain how modern biological processes constrain many geochemical reactions, and show how palaeoenvironmental conditions impacted the evolution and preservation of prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms across geologic time. This subject will demonstrate how geomicrobiological and biogeochemical knowledge can be applied to problems in academic and government research, and in the petroleum, mineral or environmental industries. We will also look at contemporary “cross-over” applications of geomicrobiology/biogeochemistry to medical microbiology (e.g., coevolution of metals and antibiotic resistance), the microbiology and biogeochemistry of urban/built environments and astrobiological investigation of life’s potential to exist elsewhere in the known universe