Course Overview: This workshop will provide students with the opportunity to learn how to use social network analysis to analyze social relational datasets such as human friendship networks or animal social networks. Attendees will learn how to use R and several R packages including igraph, sna, network, asnipe, timeordered, tsna to create network graphs, calculate descriptive network metrics, use randomization and random models to evaluate the significance of these metrics, determine graph structural properties including community structures, use QAP and…

Course Overview: This course will provide an introduction to modern multivariate techniques, with a special focus on the analysis of abundance or presence/absence data. Multivariate analysis in ecology has been changing rapidly in recent years, with a focus now on formulating a statistical model to capture key properties of the observed data, rather than transformation of data using a dissimilarity-based framework. In recent years, model-based techniques have been developed for hypothesis testing, identifying indicator species, ordination, clustering, predictive modelling, and…

Course Overview: Metabarcoding techniques are a set of novel genetic tools for assessing biodiversity of natural communities. Their potential applications include (but are not limited to) accurate water quality, soil diversity assessment, trophic analyses of digestive contents, early detection of non-indigenous species, studies of global ecological patterns and biomonitoring of anthropogenic impacts. This course will give an overview of metabarcoding procedures with an emphasis on practical problem-solving and hands-on work using analysis pipelines on real datasets. After completing the course,…

Course Overview: Phytomappers Pro was created to scale drone education for agricultural and other related verticals, such as scientific, forestry, and environmental consultancies. This course walks step-by-step through everything you'd need to know to get started mapping plants professionally, including:
 • The theory behind vegetation indices, such as NDVI
 • Best-practices for image capture
 • Drone and camera hardware
 • Mission planning software
 • Image processing and data outputs using Pix4D
 • Cloud tools
 • Example datasets We teach you…

Course Overview: The Quick-start Guide to Plants and Drones is a FREE course! The goal of this course is to bring students up to speed quickly on the commercial drone industry and specifically where plant mapping fits in. The class provides a general overview of where the drone industry has been and where it is headed next, specifically as it relates to plant-related industries, including agriculture, forestry, scientific, and more. This course assumes you are a professional (or want to…

About The next International Seabird Group Conference is being organised by Jon Green and Samantha Patrick and colleagues from the University of Liverpool. The conference promises to provide an exciting showcase of the latest seabird research, located within the heart of the city of Liverpool, famous for its maritime history and cultural diversity. Keynote speakers and early career events will compliment two and a half days of talks and posters, covering all aspects of seabird research. The Seabird Group registered…

Course Overview: Most high-throughput bioinformatics work these days takes place on the Linux command line. The programs which do the majority of the computational heavy lifting — genome assemblers, read mappers, and annotation tools — are designed to work best when used with a command-line interface. Because the command line can be an intimidating environment, many biologists learn the bare minimum needed to get their analysis tools working. This means that they miss out on the power of Linux to…

Course Overview: This 5-day course will cover the concepts, methods, and R tools that can be used to analyse spatial data in ecology. The start of the course will cover the basics of linear models and spatial data processing in R and provide a common ground for more advanced techniques encountered later on the course. We will cover spatial statistical techniques for both continuous and discrete data response types. We will put special emphasis on understanding mechanisms using visual tools, and…

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: 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: To follow Intended Audience Anyone using acoustic telemetry methods for tracking aquatic animals 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,…

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),…