This is the first course in the Agroecology core series. The course is an introduction to agroecology, focusing on the relationship between agriculture and its surrounding ecosystem. The aim of the course is to provide you with a solid understanding of agriculture’s impact on the environment, the environmental constraints on production, and the basic principles of agricultural ecology.
Through this course, you will gain basic skills required for working in teams, doing field and lab work, preparing reports, presenting orally and learning effectively on your own. These skills will be utilized explicitly throughout the remainder of the Agroecology core series and will be applicable more broadly in your other classes and your career in general. Whether you decide to become an agroecologist or not this course will enable you to provide a critical and scientific approach to evaluating agroecosystems for sustainability. This will inform the decisions that you will need to make whether you are a food system professional or an eater.
APBI 260 is designed to provide students with a wide range of learning opportunities to enable students to explore and better understand how they learn effectively. Students will be provided with hands-on and case based projects. Each week students will work on these projects in teams in a field/lab that will take place at the UBC farm and in a Problem-Based Learning (PBL) session that will be held on the main campus.
Students will utilize a combination of the Canvas, Turnitin, Piazza, and iClicker for discussions, assignments and announcements. To reduce costs & waste, all course materials will be made available electronically. There will be a weekend extra credit field trip to visit agricultural operations in the Fraser River Valley which will help inform their understanding and ability to address the case problems they are given.