Syllabus
Each year only several selected topics from the following list will be covered. Species density and richness Scaling of species richness, species-area relationships Species diversity and species-abundance distributions Detectability, abundance, and species distributions Spatial dispersion and species co-occurrence Functional and phylogenetic diversity Ecological niches: niche width, overlap, and specialization Null models in ecology
Annotation
As scientists and citizens, we want to ask and answer big questions: What drives biodiversity? How does it change in space and time? Does it decline? If so, is it due to human activities? However, to answer these questions, we must be able to measure and analyze biodiversity - precisely and accurately. This course is designed to teach students to do just that.
It is a practical course in that it will be focused on teaching students how to work with real data on biodiversity.
However, to provide a proper motivation, we introduce each topic with a short lecture in terms of its history, the theory behind it, and challenges for measurement and analysis. In the practicals (running in blocks), we will analyze real data in the statistical software R. We will learn about different libraries for the analysis of a given type of data, proper implementation of methods, and interpretation of results.
Students enrolling in the course should have passed an introductory course of ecology. A basic knowledge of the R software would be useful, but it is not necessary (we will learn everything needed during practicals). To make things clear, we note that this is neither a course in theoretical ecology (analysis of mathematical models) nor ecological statistics (analyzing statistical relationships among variables), but that we will try and quantify important concepts of ecological thinking, which is necessary for their critical evaluation.