ECOL30007: Marine Ecosystems: Ecology & Management

Mini-symposium (presentation and participation, 15%) at the end of semester; critiques of tutorial readings (up to 2000 words) due throughout semester (25%); mid-term written examination of 1 hour (20%); written examination of 2 hours during the final examination period (40%)

"Mini Symposium" - You have to do an oral presentation, 8-10 minutes per a group member in a group of 5 people, about topic like "Aquaculture" or supertrawlers.
Critiques of Tute readings - You get given some studies and you have answer some questions about them. I think it was 800-1000 word limit, about a page per tute. You could get assessed on up to 3 tutes, but only 2 would count.

Lectures:
Vary in quality and content. Sometimes we would have like 3-6 lectures on a topic like "Disturbance", which wasn't very interesting, and we'd only have one lecture (by Tim Jessop) on Megafauna (turtles and such). As someone who is more into animals than anything else, I thought the lectures would have more on ecology and management of marine animals. It was more about well, everything in the marine ecosystem. Including lectures on ocean acidification and rising temperatures, and the effects it would have. Not super engaging for me, but still interesting in a way.

I would say it's better to attend these than skip them because sometimes the lecture slide content is hard to follow, especially Mick Keough's lecture slides which have little content (mostly pictures). I had problems with understanding the concepts in his lectures but I found the two reviews he posts on the LMS (Sousa 2001 and Minchinton 2007) really helpful to read, as his lectures take content from them.

Tutes:
Easiest way to get marks. You are given a series of readings to study, and there is also a question sheet. You basically answer the question sheet. Each tute had a question along the lines of "Design an experiment.." , which was sometimes difficult to come up with. If you take this subject I highly advise going to the tutorial classes that relate to each tute, as the lecturer will pretty much give you the answers to everything (so take notes!).

Midsem:
Just a short answer test on lectures that had been done. Straightforward, you just need to make sure you understand what each lecture was about.

Oral presentations:
The worst part of the subject. We were in groups of 5-6, presenting on a very broad topic. It was worth 15% (and no idea how they marked us). My group spent over a month meeting at least once a week with multiple Facebook, Drive etc chats to make sure we covered everything and nothing overlapped. We also had to include "research project" type plan thing which was supposed to be our answer to problems brought up in our presentations (eg. supertrawlers catch turtles, dolphins and other megafauna as bycatch, how can this be reduced?). I feel for the amount of work that was put in (everyone had to present for 8-10 minutes) it wasn't worth the time we spent (especially since the tutes were worth 12.5% each).

Time commitment:
So when you do your timetabling, it looks like you have a 3hr workshop twice a week every week. In actuality that timeslot is just for the oral presentations so you'll only have to go to classes in that timeslot maybe 3 times at the end of the semester.

Exam:
They will give you practice exam questions, and I guess the format is kind of similar. There were 4 or 5 x 5 mark questions and 4 x 20 mark exam questions. You had to do all of them.
The questions weren't too difficult in my opinion, especially if you've done revision (went through lectures, did some background reading etc). I just didn't think I wrote enough content to cover 20 marks for each of the 20 mark questions. I'm not sure how much detail they want you to go into because they don't supply sample answers so I just wrote as much as I could.. and I hope that was enough.

Overall I'm not sure if I regret taking this subject. Aside from the laborious oral presentation, it was kind of a relaxing subject. Not quite a bludge but it wasn't super difficult either.

Yes, only audio.

Mainly Tim Dempster, Steve Swearer, Mick Keough and Rob Day.

n/a. A relatively new subject (think it only started last year, in 2013). But they do supply sample exam questions.

3/5

No textbook, mostly just the tute readings and such. Would definitely recommend reading the readings they link at the end of each lecture or ones they mention, as the content in each lecture is often based around studies that have been done.

28 lectures; 4 tutorials; 12 hours of group multimedia presentations

2014, Sem 1