author: Jorge Assis
contact: jmassis@ualg.pt
code: github.com/jorgeassis
tweets: twitter.com/jorgemfassis
journal: medium.com/theMarineDataScientist
The course 'Marine Ecological Modelling and Global Climate Change' was designed as an elective course within the Master programme Marine Biology at the University of Algarve.
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Scope
The course covers the interactions and potential impacts of global climate changes (past, ongoing and future) on different levels of marine biodiversity. It is mostly hands-on oriented, with a strong component on biodiversity and climate data acquisition, management and visualisation (e.g., the new Representative Concentration Pathway scenarios of climate change), as well as on ecological modelling using state of the art mechanistic and correlative approaches (e.g., machine learning algorithms). -
Target audience
The course is targeted to MSc and PhD students in the fields of marine biology, ecology, conservation and evolution. Students must be fluent in English and have some basic knowledge on marine ecology, statistics and R computing language (although not mandatory). Students are highly encouraged to bring their own datasets (if data are not available, the professor will provide own data). -
Topics
Exploring interactions and potential impacts of global climate changes (past, ongoing and future) on different levels of marine biodiversity. -
Goals
Get to know the foundations of ecological niche theory and marine macroecology;
Develop skills on marine biodiversity and climate data acquisition, management and visualisation;
Develop skills on correlative ecological niche modelling (ENM);
Understand the strengths of ENM and the concept of transferability across space and time;
Develop skills on good practice ENM following proper parametization and evaluation of predictive performances;
Get to know how to discuss the results of ENM and the potential impacts of climate change on the distribution of marine biodiversity, and defend them to a wide audience. -
Sessions T
S01. Course overview
S02. Climate oscillations and distributional shifts of marine biodiversity
S03. Principles of Geographic Information Systems
S04. Biological and environmental data for macroecology
S05. Ecological niches and geographic distributions, a perspective from macroecology
S06. Principles of Ecological Niche Modelling
S07. Potential applications of Ecological Niche Modelling
S08. Model fitting and transferability in space and time
S09. Evaluating predictive performance and setting decision thresholds
S10. Improving transferability of Ecological Niche Modelling -
Sessions P
S01. Brief recap of R basics
S02. Basic programming elements
S03. R as a Geographic Information System
S05. Biodiversity data in R
S06. Environmental data in R
S07. Developing Ecological Niche Models
S08. Predictive performance in Ecological Modelling
S09. Data-driven hyperparameter and variable selection