With hypervolumetric grin
I grow more Hutchinsonian
Despite intense investigation
Of axial proliferation.
Each bird I see expands in place
To seventeen-dimension space;
And should it light on forest floor,
Then axes sprout a dozen more!
Euclid would approve with glee
How territoriality
Of bunting perched upon a stone
Is asymptote to hypercone!
And should competing species brawl
A tesseract defines the sprawl.
Yet meaning loses in the end;
We've lost the zero origin!
This lovely little poem captures the experience (and angst) of a lot of ecologists who find themselves wading into the world of modelling and statistics. Mainly, because most of us got into this gig becasue we like being outside and are curious about the processes that shape the natural world. NOT (emphatically), because we wanted to become statisticians, computer programmers, etc.. However, that seems to be where a lot of us find ourselves because models and computers are the unavoidable tools of modern ecological research (for the most part).
Therefore, the purpose of the course is to: 1) try to de-mistify ecological modelling; 2) develop simple version contol tools to help make our research open, understandable, and reproducible; and 3) hopefully make us all better ecologists by learning how to think about statistical modelling in terms of the ecological patterns and processes we are researching (and not the other way around).