NRES 199 Wild Animal Planet is taught by Dr. Mike Ward–Wednesdays 6:30-7:50 pm in 120 Architecture Building (3 hours, CRN: 57253). Wild Animal Planet is the perfect course for students who love nature shows and want to be able to interact with an expert. It will expose students to the amazing diversity and behavior of animals and provide an introduction to applied ecology.

This course will cover the diversity of fish, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and birds both around the world and here in Illinois. It will provide basic information on how these organisms are able to survive in the harshest environments ranging from the Sahara Desert to Michigan Avenue, Chicago. The course will introduce students to the variety of behaviors exhibited by different organisms (e.g. the mating displays of birds of paradise, the great migrations of mammals and birds). While many of these behaviors occur in remote locations, the course will highlight the amazing behaviors of animals in the student’s backyard. The course will have a strong conservation component where students are introduced to a variety of threats facing animals. It will also present information on how to manage sustainable populations in order to provide fishing and hunting opportunities. Finally, the students will be exposed to current issues in Illinois to illustrate how people and animals can co-occur and a broad overview of the management, restoration, and conservation techniques require to maintain animal populations.

ACES 199 Sustainable Food Systems is team taught by faculty from several departments in the College of ACES–Tuesdays and Thursdays 2:00-3:20 pm in 108 Bevier Hall (3 hours, CRN: 57624). We get bombarded with conflicting messages about food, hunger, health, and sustainability. Here’s a chance to learn how to make sense of it all! This course is designed to foster critical systems thinking and collaborative analysis across multiple disciplines for the production, preparation, and consumption of food within complex social and ecological systems. The course includes the consideration of challenge of producing enough food to feed the world population, and the environmental (e.g., climate change, sustainability, environmental footprint), economic (e.g., food insecurity) and health (e. g., obesity, diabetes) issues that are related to food. A central idea is to start with “the food we eat” and connect it to health (e.g., obesity, nutrition, disease), the environment (e.g., environmental implications), the global economy (e.g., population growth, community economic development), and technology (e.g., genomics, engineering, information processing).