Aquatic Environmental Analysis

Entry requirements

Biology 5 credits, Ecology for engineers 5 credits and Probability and Statistics 5 credits.

Learning outcomes

After completion of the course the student should be able to

• Apply the environmental analysis cycle for studying effects of environmental problems in aquatic environments.
• explain the principles of the Swedish environmental assessment criteria, environmental goals, water management and international agreements
• explain how eutrophication, acidification and environmental contaminants affect aquatic ecosystems in Sweden and how they affect society and debates about how these problems are handled.
• use the environmental assessment criteria, publically-available environmental data and geographic information systems to analyse environmental problems with a large spatical distribution
• explain the concept of naturalness with respect to surface water
• critically analyse environmental data and model predictions with statistics to quantify past and future human impacts on the aquatic environment

Content

This course consists of two main parts. The part Aquatic pollution deals primarily with the major chemical threats to aquatic ecosystems, i. e., acidification (of lakes), eutrophication of lakes and coastal waters, and contamination (metals and organic contaminants in primarily lakes, rivers and coastal waters). This is the basis for the second part dealing with the Swedish system for the ranking of environmental threats, evaluation criteria for lakes and streams, as well as related legislation and international agreements. The theoretical part of environmental analysis addresses the principles for assessing and responding to environmentally harmful substances in aquatic ecosystems, in the context of the environmental analysis cycle . The course uses various forms of environmental data, various models of environmentally harmful substances and different methods remediating problems, including aspects of politics and public debate. This course provides an introduction to the use of geographic information systems.

Instruction

Lectures and exercises.

Assessment

Report from the lab exercises (1 credit) and a written exam which is taken at the end of the course (4 credits).