Course Overview: This course will cover time series analysis with a particular focus on applications in ecology. All methods will be illustrated using the free, open-source software package R. The course is designed for attendees that have a basic knowledge of R and elementary statistics but not necessarily time series. Time Series data are ubiquitous in the physical sciences, and models for their behaviour enable scientists to understand temporal dynamics and predict future values. The course will cover a range…

Course Overview: This course will cover introductory mixed or hierarchical modelling (fixed and random effects models) for real-world data sets from both a Frequentist and Bayesian perspective. These methods lie at the forefront of statistics research and are a vital tool in the scientist’s toolbox. The course focuses on introducing concepts and demonstrating good practice in mixed modelling. All methods are demonstrated with data sets which participants can run themselves. Participants will be taught how to fit hierarchical models using both the standard lme4…

Course Overview: This application-driven course will provide a founding in the basic theory & practice of Bayesian statistics, with a focus on MCMC modeling for ecological & epidemiological problems. Starting from a refresher on probability & likelihood, the course will take students all the way to cutting-edge applications such as state-space population modelling & spatial point-process modelling. By the end of the week, you should have a basic understanding of how common MCMC samplers work and how to program them,…

Course Overview: Analysis of high throughput genome and transcriptome data is major component of many research projects ranging from large-scale precision medicine efforts to focused investigations in model systems. This analysis involves the identification of specific genome or transcriptome features that predispose individuals to disease, predict response to therapies, influence diagnosis/prognosis, or provide mechanistic insights into disease models. During this course (PMBI01), students will perform an example end-to-end bioinformatics analysis of genome (WGS and Exome) and transcriptome (RNA-seq) data. Students…

Course overview:  The course will consist of a series of 8 modules each lasting roughly half a day, and designed to build required skills for subsequent modules and more advanced courses. At its conclusion, participants will have acquired basic skills in coding with R, and will be able to perform and interpret simple analyses, and critically evaluate similar analyses from the scientific literature and technical reports. Intended Audience The course is aimed at biologists with no experience using the software…

Course Overview: Phylogenetic comparative methods are commonly used nowadays to investigate how species diversification occurs and to test hypotheses about the mechanisms that drive phenotypic evolution, e.g. to model speciation and extinction, to understand why some groups are more diverse than others, to test whether phenotypic traits have evolved under neutral, directional or diversifying selection, to investigate how evolutionary rates are modified across the evolutionary history of a group etc. In all these cases, a phylogenetic hypothesis for the group…

Course Overview: The course will describe different aspects and methods in the field of functional ecology, combining theoretical lessons with hands-on real data. Lectures will provide the theoretical and mathematical basis for different applications of functional traits at organismal, community and ecosystem levels, with examples across different trophic levels. This will serve as a basis for exploring the practical tools to connect the effect of land-use and climate change on biodiversity to the effect of biodiversity on to multiple ecosystem…

Course Overview: Survival analysis is a set of statistical methods initially designed to analyse data giving the times at which individuals die, and assess the effect that different predictor variables have on the rate of death. However, its applications are much broader than this: it can be used to analyse any time-to-event data. Ecologists and evolutionary biologists often encounter data of this kind. Often factors influencing survival itself will be of interest. But there are many other cases, e.g. what…

Course Overview: This course will provide an introduction to working with real-life data typical of those encountered in the field of evolutionary biology and ecology. The course will be delivered by Dr. Luc Bussiere, Dr. Tom Houslay and Dr. Ane Timenes Laugen who are all practicing academics in the field of evolutionary biology.  This five day course will consist of series of modules (each lasting roughly half a day) covering model selection and simplification, generalised linear models, mixed effects models,  and non-linear models. Along…

Course Overview: Acoustic telemetry has become increasingly popular as a method of choice for monitoring the movements and behaviour of aquatic animals globally.  Increasingly smaller tags along with improvements in battery technology have allowed for tagging a wide variety of species and life stages, enabling monitoring of individuals as small as salmon smolts and as large as whale sharks for periods from 30 days to 10 years.  Receiver technology also continues to evolve and increasingly allows for data to be…

Course Overview: This course aims to help you to draw better statistical inferences from empirical research, improve the statistical questions you ask when you collect data, design better and more efficient studies, and improve your meta-analytic thinking. In practical, hands on assignments, you will learn techniques and tools that can be immediately implemented in your own research, such as thinking about the smallest effect size you are interested in, justifying your sample size, evaluate findings in the literature while keeping…

Course Overview: The course will cover the concepts, technology and software tools that can be used to analyse movement data (from ringing/CMR to VHF/GPS to novel biologging data) in ecology and evolution, covering analysis techniques applicable broadly to most taxa, from micro-organisms to plants and animals. We will cover elementary and advanced analysis and modelling techniques broadly applicable across taxa, highlighting the advantages of a unified Movement Ecology framework. We will provide the necessary bases in ecology (especially behavioural ecology),…

Course Overview: Coming soon. Intended Audience Coming soon Venue - PR statistics head office, 53 Morrison Street, Glasgow, G5 8LB – Google map Availability - 30 places Duration – 5 days Contact hours – Approx. 35 hours ECT’s – Equal to 3 ECT’s Language - English Packages We offer COURSE ONLY and ACCOMMODATION PACKAGES; • COURSE ONLY – Includes lunch and refreshments. • ACCOMMODATION PACKAGE (to be purchased in addition to the course only option) – Includes breakfast, lunch, welcome dinner Monday…

Course Overview: The course will cover the base theory of ecological niche modelling and its main methodologies. By the end of this 5-day practical course, attendees will have the capacity to perform ecological niche models and understand their results, as well as to choose and apply the correct methodology depending on the aim of their type of study and data. Ecological niche, species distribution, habitat distribution, or climatic envelope models are different names for similar mechanistic or correlative models, empirical…

Course Overview: This course will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn how (a) to understand and read modern statistics reported in scientific studies, (b) use basic modern statistics for analysing their own data, using the open access R statistical software. The course will focus more on data deriving from life sciences namely medicine, biology, and ecology. The course will initially revise basic statistical knowledge of what is a sample and a distribution, and what is hypothesis testing. Sequentially, attendees…

Course Overview: The term ‘landscape genetics’ has been applied studies that integrate ecological context and intervening landscape into population genetic analyses of contemporary processes such as gene flow and migration.  This course will cover the basics of both quantitative landscape ecology and population genetics, focusing on how we develop and evaluate spatial/genetic analyses using the R platform. Intended Audience This course is suitable for graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and primary investigators interested in learning how to integrate landscape ecological and…

Course Overview: This workshop will provide attendees with the opportunity to learn how to use machine learning to analyze data coming from diverse data domains and scientific disciplines and without necessarily prior knowledge of the scientific discipline where the data are coming from. Attendees will learn how to use R and several R packages including classification and regression trees, ensembles and bagging, random forests, neural networks, and boosting (learning from mistakes). These techniques will be used for data classification, determining…

Course Overview: This 5-day workshop will introduce the development and application of Marxan type spatial planning tools to prioritize land acquisition, easements and incentives in favor of conservation. We are going to use the prioritizr framework (https://prioritizr.github.io/prioritizr/) and an example developed for the Coastal Douglas Fir Conservation Partnership (CDFCP) region by the group of Peter Arcese at UBC (http://arcese.forestry.ubc.ca/marxan-tool-cdfcp/) The reserve design problem will be introduced using examples from the BC Central Coast, Georgia Basin-Willamette Valley of BC, WA and…