Professional training and graduate education needs for warfare ecology

Background/Question/Methods

What are the current best practices in Graduate Education (GE) that would be particularly useful to Warfare Ecology (WE), a budding subdiscipline within the area of Environmental Sciences?  Warfare Ecology deals with the application of ecological principles and methods to understand the interactions between warfare and natural systems.  As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and development of professional training and graduate education opportunities in this area would be best served if guided by current best practices for interdisciplinary graduate education.  I review current teaching strategies and experiences that may be particularly appropriate to develop effective graduate and professional training programs in Warfare Ecology. I specifically highlight 1) Characteristics of WE that should guide research training and education in this science theme, 2) Shared elements of interdisciplinary graduate training programs 3) Training skills and educational strategies that may be unique to Warfare Ecology or otherwise should be explored. 

Results/Conclusions

Given the nature of the subject, WE addresses problems that can be framed using a natural-human coupled ecosystem model.  Using the widely accepted NSF-IGERT program as a model of interdisciplinary education, baseline elements of a WE graduate program should include: a) An interdisciplinary core course curriculum with emphasis on problem or theme-based learning and a collaborative learning focus, b) Experiential learning and, c) Faculty committed to interdisciplinary training and research, and d) a built-in mechanism for program assessment.   Educational strategies particularly relevant to Warfare Ecology graduate education would necessarily include International Experiences, Professional Partnerships, Science Ethics Course(s), Information Technology and Open Education.  While current world events unequivocally suggest that WE is a professional niche that needs to be filled, the amount of resources to develop and implement a specialized WE program may impose unavoidable institutional hurdles in higher institutions around the world.