Overview

THE INTERDEPARTMENTAL UNIVERSITY PROGRAM IN ECOLOGY at Duke includes over a hundred ecologists in a number of departments across the University. The program's roots can be traced to the beginnings of ecological science in North America. The Chronicle of Higher Education very recently rated Duke Ecology as one of the most scientifically productive ecology programs in America. In the disciplinary category "ecology, evolution, and behavior", Duke has been rated as one of the top three programs in the nation by the National Research Council.

Duke Ecology hosts strong individual research programs in all levels of biological organization -- from the organism to the ecosystem -- and provides excellent educational opportunities in ecology at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels.

Duke's teaching and research programs address the basic and applied research problems in ecology, that are articulated by various governmental, industrial, and foundation agencies, and summarized by scientific communities such as the Ecological Society of America in its "Sustainable Biosphere Initiative."

Ecologists participating in the program represent research interests that span basic and applied ecological science with notable strengths in global-change ecology, evolutionary ecology, biogeochemistry, and forest, marine, and wetland ecology. The Program provides the organizational structure necessary for graduate students and scientific researchers to integrate their observations across scales of biological organization and apply their research to pressing ecological and environmental problems.

Few universities can assemble a program with the quality that we have at Duke, a program that is supported by a vast array of resources in the nearby Research Triangle, including North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina. These three major universities cooperate in a long-standing Inter-Institutional Agreement that promotes graduate student enrollment in coursework at all three universities. By their very nature, the ecological sciences encompass nearly all scientific disciplines, ranging from biochemical, physiological, and organismal studies to studies of geology and paleoecology, and the atmospheric sciences. The intellectual focus of this program reflects this breadth because we are convinced that a solid ecological training, basic and applied, involves interdisciplinary study.