Workshops in quantitative methods in ecology

[Melanie Colón]

The Association of Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC) is pleased
to announce THREE capacity-building workshops in quantitative methods
that will be held before and after the 2015 annual meeting held in
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA (meeting dates July 12-16th, 2015).

All three courses are US$220 per head, EXCLUDING travel and
accommodation.   

The courses will be held on the campus of the University of Hawaii Manoa
in St. John Hall.  A campus meal card will be provided for participants
for refreshments and lunches.

Affordable accommodation is available at the University of Hawaii  East-
West center ($32 - 80 per night depending on room type: sgl/dbl/studio).
Contact Clifford Morden (cmorden@hawaii.edu) for more details and to
book accommodation.

Some scholarships are available to support student travel to the
conference and workshops. Conference participants are encouraged to
participate in the mentoring scheme that supports early career
scientists.

Participants must bring their own laptops. For specific questions about
individual workshops, please contact the relevant course instructor.

1) Basic statistics (July 7 – 11, 2015)
Instructor: Dr Kyle Tomlinson (Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens,
China, kyle.tomlinson@xtbg.org.cn).

This is an intensive five-day course based on the open source program R,
which is introduced to course participants at the beginning of the
course and used throughout. The course covers simple univariate
statistics and experimental design. At the end students will be able to
identify what type of univariate analysis is appropriate given the
characteristics of data being analysed and be able to run the analyses
in R.
 
2) Advanced statistics (July 6 – 11, 2015)
Instructor: Dr Robert Bagchi (University of Connecticut, USA,
robert.bagchi@uconn.edu).

This six-day intensive course will focus on fitting multi-level models
in R. Instruction will involve a combination of lectures and class
activities, including extensive analysis of real and simulated data
sets. Participants will learn how to decide on an analytical approach,
fit and understand multi-level models, make robust inferences and
present results of analyses in publications.

3) Fundamentals of GIS for ecology and species distribution modelling
(July 17 – 21, 2015)
Instructor: Dr Alice Hughes (Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Gardens,
China, ach_biodiversity@outlook.com).

The workshop aims to: A). Train students in fundamental GIS tools and
techniques using a number of different software programs; B). Teach
students to design and implement studies using GIS techniques, and avoid
potential biases; C). Discuss various predictive modeling techniques to
spatially project species distributions under present and  changing
conditions and: D). Use various approaches and spatial statistics to
interpret and analyse the results.

More details on all three courses are available at
http://www.atbc2015.org/#!registration/ch2t
(scroll down to Training Workshops).