Environment and Ecology Systems

Environment and Ecology Systems is a complete grounding in the science that underpins environmental practice. It takes you from the physical drivers that set where life can live, through the measurement of biodiversity, the flow of energy and the cycling of nutrients, to the dynamics of populations, communities, landscapes and the whole biosphere - and then into the human side: resource use, ethics, policy and law, conservation management and environmental impact assessment.

The course is written for people who need to use ecology, not only admire it. Every lesson carries real methods and real numbers: how primary production is measured and what it amounts to biome by biome, how diversity indices are calculated and where they mislead, how the IUCN Red List criteria are structured, how mark-recapture estimates are produced and corrected, how edge effects erode the usable core of a habitat patch, and how impact assessment turns ecological baseline data into a defensible mitigation hierarchy.

Throughout, the emphasis is on systems thinking: pools and fluxes, feedbacks and time lags, thresholds and resilience. By the end you should be able to look at a site, a catchment or a policy proposal and say what is actually being changed, what evidence would show it, and what could be done about it.

What you will learn

• How ecological systems are organised, from organism to biosphere, and how scale changes the question you can answer
• How to quantify biodiversity using richness, Shannon and Simpson indices, rarefaction and species-area relationships - and how to read IUCN Red List assessments
• How energy enters and moves through ecosystems, and how to work with gross and net primary production, trophic efficiency and ecological pyramids
• How carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulphur cycle, how decomposition and soils regulate nutrient retention, and where human activity has overloaded these cycles
• How populations grow, are regulated and are estimated, including logistic growth, life tables, mark-recapture and minimum viable population thinking
• How species interactions build community structure, and how succession, disturbance and resilience govern change over time
• How landscape structure, fragmentation, edge effects and connectivity determine what survives in a modified world
• How environmental ethics, policy, law, conservation management and impact assessment turn ecological understanding into practice

Who it is for

The course suits environmental officers, HSE and sustainability professionals, EIA and ESIA practitioners, planners, engineers and consultants who need ecological literacy for their day job; conservation and protected-area staff; teachers and students of environmental science; and anyone moving into an environmental role from another discipline who needs the scientific foundation quickly and rigorously. No prior degree in biology is assumed - the mathematics used is arithmetic and simple algebra, worked through step by step.

How the course works

Study is entirely online and self-paced, so you can work through the modules in whatever blocks of time suit you and return to any lesson as often as you like. Expect around six to eight hours of study in total. The course concludes with a 30-question final exam with a pass mark of 70%; on passing you receive a verifiable SKEDMIA certificate of completion.