I took this class for a biology elective requirement, so I did not have much background in environmental science going into it. The lectures were informative but did not always keep my attention. The professor strayed from the material often and would call on 5+ people until getting the desired answer to his questions, which made it hard for me to stay engaged. There were numerous opportunities for extra credit (such as attending talks of guest speakers or poster events), and the professor was kind and helpful in office hours. He worked closely with the graduate TA, who provided a study guide based off the exam. I would definitely base my studying around the study guide and gain clarification/expansion on these questions. The professor also provided practice questions, which I did not find nearly as helpful since they were not based on the exam. The exam style through us all for a loop. The first one was almost all multiple choice, but the second one was ALL short answer (which allowed for generous partial credit!). The third exam was on the last day of classes and was a mix of multiple choice and short answer questions. There was no final exam, and the exams were (mostly) not comprehensive; you had to maintain some basic knowledge from prior exams and draw broader conclusions, which was not hard if you have a biology/environmental science background. The professor was also very lenient and understanding about time constraints. Despite not having SDAC accommodations, he allowed everyone to have as much extra time as necessary to complete the exams, allowing students to take their exams to the library on their honor to finish. Reading the textbook, or at least skimming certain parts of it, worked very well for me so that I could expand on for the short-answer questions. The first few chapters were not as informative, but later chapters were. I would recommend using the textbook as an aid if you do not have a strong background in environmental science, but it is not absolutely necessary to succeed as everything is covered in lecture or could be expanded on in office hours. #tCFS24

Literally don't even get me started. I was wondering why after TEN years of bad reviews, Prof Lerdau is still teaching this class - then I realized: tenure. UGH.
He is absolutely awful. He is literally the worst lecturer I've ever had at UVA, and I have taken 3-4 large lectures per sem. He will ramble on for 30 minutes about some random trivia fact and then boom, test you on it. But here is the worst part about him: beginning of semester he seems so sweet and tells us that he weighs exams based on individual success. So if you get an 80 on one, and 100 on the other, he will weigh the 100 more. This totally took some of the weight off for me, since I received a 101% on the first exam.
Well, he completely lied. He weighed them all equally, and even though I ended up with a 93 on canvas, they gave me an A-. And when we all emailed him asking why he told us he would curve UP and would weigh our better exams more, we were met with an automated "out of office until May 15th" message. Great! Grades are due on the 13th. He probably intentionally did this because he knew he would be met with confusion after he promised us that we would all get our best score weighted heaviest.

His exams are purely ridiculous. He literally asks you random trivia. The TA will make a study guide with "concepts to know", and then on the exam he'll ask the most ridiculous detailed question that NO one would know the answer to in a fundamental class. For example, he asks us "in a long rant about __, I quickly said __. What did I mean by this?"
Why would we know that when he rants about 30 mins per slide about literally random US history and fun facts. It is literally painful. I seem all over the place writing this review but it's because I am fired up about how awful of a teacher he was. He is rude, and tells us how bad the exams will be in the first place. Look I get it if this was a 4000 level detailed ecology class, but this literally covers every base of ecology pretty surface level. So for him to go and test us quite unfairly, then utterly LIE about curving and weighing good exams more, is insane.

Oh and the TA is useless. She holds a review session before the exam on zoom and a lot of people join and ask questions. She literally will reply and be like "Ugh I told Manuel this was a bad question, hopefully he took it off! His questions are awful". Ok, if his questions are awful and you can't even answer them why is it fair that we as students seeing this material for the first time should be able to. Furthermore, the concepts on her study guide that she highlights as very important, she will end up saying "Oh this was subjective I guess you don't really need to know this etc" on zoom, just because she herself doesn't even know the answer to an ambiguous question he made and refused to remove.

If you are a bio major and taking this as an elective DO NOT. I made the mistake of doing it and it has brought me nothing but rage and promises that weren't kept. He does not have anyone's best interests in mind. He "forgets" to bring our graded exams to class every day for 3 weeks after they've been graded. he doesn't answer emails because he's "bad at tech" and "off the grid". He's literally middle aged so being "bad at tech" is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. Please whatever you do avoid this god awful class.

This guy must hate his students. The concepts are easy enough and if you study and pay attention you will understand them, and that's coming from someone who isn't super inclined towards science. However, I think he genuinely enjoys making tests excruciatingly hard. He will literally say things in class like "I may put a nasty, tricky question about this on the exam," I think he expects everyone in the class to have had significant background in ecology/biology, which just isn't possible for every student. This class is endlessly frustrating. He seems like a good enough guy but the way he almost jokes about making exams miserable for us is really disheartening and truly led me to hate this class. I studied for one of his exams for two weeks and still was so embarrassingly unprepared because he asked entirely theoretical questions that it would have been virtually impossible to study for. I know I'm not going to end with a good grade in this class and honestly I don't blame anyone but him, because I worked really hard to do well in this class.

Not the best lecturer, but asks oddly specific questions on exams, so be ready to take notes on the worst lectures you may be able to find, anywhere, ever. Bless your soul if you take it with Manuel - be ready to do some history research because he makes so many references that a reliable sense of US History is critical to not falling asleep in class. If you've already taken BIOL 2100 though, it'll be a cake walk.

You have no homework. You may have to do light reading if you get lost in the lecture. The book is a great supplement to the lecture. Lerdau's lectures are a bit confusing because he talks in circles sometimes. For his class, you need to write down everything Lerdau says and study it. I recommend allocating three nights to study for his test, but other than those few nights before exams, you have NO work.

Literally most boring class I have ever taken. He is so disorganized and his tests do not align with what you study.

This class is not one that will stick in your brain as the most fun, hardest, stupidest, etc. It is middling class in almost all regards, and not very memorable, but with that said the class was fairly easy on the workload, no required readings, no homework, no attendance checks either (but that's probably a bad idea). The most important part of this class is to pay attention to lerdau and focus on the concepts not specifics which is what he tests on, which are quite long given the timespan, so know your stuff. If you master that, and can manage to stay focused you'll find Lerdau is very passionate and the content can be fun and relevant.

Lerdau is very approachable, understanding, and just generally a nice guy. The entire grade for his version of the course is 3 exams, each worth 33% of your grade without a cumulative final. All exams are free response are very generously curved, which is needed because they are very toughly graded. All of the lecture material comes directly from the textbook, including almost all of the slide pictures and text on the slides, so you don't really have to go to class. It's completely possible to do no work for this course outside of 3 all-nighters and get a B. Overall, my only complaint would be it can be a bit boring at times, but that's to be expected.

Course material is interesting. I really liked how Lerdau presented it with his economics background. His tests asked for more of a synthesis of concepts and analysis then memorization. You have to go to his lectures, because his slides are rather bare. Take notes on the slides first, because he flips through fast, and leave space to write down what he's actually saying.

Lerdau was a nice enough guy but take it with Smith if you can. You cannot just learn from the book because he asks stuff about what he said in class. He posts the slides but if you do take the class definitely take detailed notes because he often asks questions on exams which are not emphasized in the slides. The exams are also basically all short answer.