Courses open for registration

In this workshop, participants will learn the principle of tidy data, how to transform and combine datasets using the tools from the tidyverse and how to generate advanced visualization with the ggplot2 package. The course will be a combination of lectures and practicals.

This online course consists of 5 modules representing a total of approximately 40 hours of work. Each module consists of video files with short theory presentations, followed by exercises using real data sets, and video files discussing the solutions. All video files are on-demand and can be watched online, as often as you want, at any time of the day, within a 6 month period. This course is taught by Dr Alain Zuur and Dr Elena Ieno, who are the leading authorities in the world on the topic of zero-inflated models in R.

Life History Theory deals with species-specific adaptive schemes of the distribution of the reproductive effort over the life of an organism. The general theoretical problem is to predict which combination of traits will evolve under specific conditions. The concepts used are also relevant to study within species variation in life history traits. The one week course aims at giving an overview of the field and will discuss methodology and recent developments. This course is organised by the Research School for Ecology and Evolution (RSEE) and PE&RC, but coordinated by RSEE.

Geostatistics is concerned with the analysis and modelling of spatial variability. It also addresses how quantified spatial variability can be used in optimal spatial interpolation and spatial stochastic simulation. Fields of application include hydrology, soil science, ecology, geology, agriculture, and forestry.

The aim of this course is to provide an introduction to R and R Studio. It introduces the participants to R language syntax, to enable them to write their own R code. They will also learn about R data-types and data-structures, and they will be taught how to explore the data and produce plots. The course will be a combination of lectures and practicals.

This is a refresher course. The level is that of a second course in Statistics. We will refresh basic knowledge of Probability, Statistical Inference (Estimation and Testing), t-tests, simple cases of Regression and ANOVA, Experimental Design, Nonparametric Tests, and Chi-square Tests. Some time is reserved to discuss statistical problems of the participants.

 Rewilding soils – building novel concepts for restoring soils and their ecology. This is the theme for the 8th edition of the international PhD course on Soil Ecology.

Microbial communities are everywhere and their properties have critical impact on our lives and our planet. But where do these community properties come from? Ultimately these properties, such as diversity, stability, resilience, function and dynamic evolution arise from the interactions of the constituent microbes with each other and their environment. But how do we connect understanding of the physiology of individual microbes in the lab to the seemingly overwhelming complexity of microbial communities in soil, marine or human environments? What role do model systems play? Are there general principles? How do we connect the different levels of organisation?

The design and analysis of experiments, using plants, animals, or humans, are an important part of the scientific process. Proper design of an experiment, apart from its proper analysis and interpretation, is important to convince a researcher that your results are valid and that your conclusions are meaningful.

This course focuses on theoretical concepts, such as autocatalytic loops and positive and negative feedbacks between organisms in ecological networks. Also, the importance of non-trophic interactions by ecosystem engineers, and how these principles can be used to link communities to ecosystems to enable to understand how environmental change affect community and ecosystem dynamics.