• The Arctic landscape: Climate, geochemistry, and topography - hierarchical controls on landscape patterns.
• The Arctic ecosystem: The role of temperature, light, nutrients, disturbance, and organisms in above and belowground ecosystems.
• Plant taxonomy and community ecology: Identifying, sampling, and classifying plant communities. Understanding ecological controls on community composition.
• Periglacial Landforms: The influence of glaciers, permafrost, and freeze/thaw cycles on landforms, soils, vegetation, and ecosystem processes.
• Soil ecology: Soil development and classification, ecosystem processes and soil organisms, soils and vegetation
• TEK - Traditional Ecological Knowledge: Understanding "Nuna" (the land) from local Inuit perspectives.
• Vertebrate ecology: Behavioral and physiological adaptations to the arctic environment. Links of wildlife, vegetation, landscape, and human activity.
• Human history and current affairs: Inuit land use, archaeological sites, mining activities.

Current Issues in Arctic Research

• Biocomplexity: Understanding complex biological systems in the Arctic. Our course curriculum is tightly linked with a multi-year NSF study looking at Biocomplexity in Arctic frost-boil ecosystems
• Arctic transitions: Extrapolating what we know in space and time - from field measures to modeling. Past courses have been integrated with the NSF funded Circumpolar Arctic Vegetation Map
• Caribou research: Interactions of migration, climate, vegetation, and hunting.

Other Skills

• Record Keeping: Recording strategies, quantitative/qualitative data, sketching, organization.
• Maps: Reading, interpretation, use in the field, map making, grid systems.
• Biogeographic Research: Research design, field study proposals, methods.