The Environmental Sustainability Assessment course aims to provide PhD students with an overview of the One Health approach, emphasizing that all actions to prevent, predict, detect, and respond to health threats should account for the interconnections between human, animal, plant, and ecosystem health.

The importance of using indicators to detect and monitor environmental conditions and ecosystem functioning represents a global objective, as highlighted by European directives.

The study of emerging animal model organisms can play a crucial role in ecological quality assessment, as they integrate both the biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem through their adaptive responses. The scientific methodologies and approaches essential for studying the effects of environmental change across all levels of biological organization will be discussed.

The importance of the relationship between environmental changes and human development and adult health in modern biology. Overview of the One Health approach. Strategies adopted by European countries to transform human activities into more sustainable systems. Overview of animal model organisms and the role of emergent organisms (i.e., species with less neurological complexity than those protected by law) in ecological quality assessment.

An overview of the potential applications of lower metazoans as model organisms addressing ecological and evolutionary questions; presentation of methodologies and protocols for the application of lower metazoans. Case studies at various levels of organization, from population to community, and ranging from microcosm to field experiments.

The teaching material prepared by the lecturer in addition to recommended textbooks (such as for instance slides, lecture notes, exercises, bibliography) and communications from the lecturer specific to the course can be found inside the Moodle platform › blended.uniurb.it

Teaching

Frontal lectures

Assessment

Assessment will be carried out through multiple choice test.

Disability and Specific Learning Disorders (SLD)

Students who have registered their disability certification or SLD certification with the Inclusion and Right to Study Office can request to use conceptual maps (for keywords) during exams.

To this end, it is necessary to send the maps, two weeks before the exam date, to the course instructor, who will verify their compliance with the university guidelines and may request modifications.