Por Diana Matos (MARE-UC).

Tiago Filipe Salgueiro de Jesus apresenta a tese "Responses of congeneric freshwater fish, Squalius carolitertii, and Squalius torgalensis, to future climate change".

Iolanda Lopes Domingues apresenta a tese "Cooperative and harmful behaviour in the bacterial world".

The continuous urban development associated with the growth of the world population has become one of the most important challenges of the present time. Today, cities accommodate more than 54% of the world's population, a proportion that is expected to increase to 70% by 2050. Trends in urbanization show that cities are becoming more complex and heterogeneous social-ecological systems with growing demand for natural resources mainly for infrastructure, housing, food, water, and energy.

Salomé Gomes Loureiro Hipólito Clemente apresenta a tese "Reproductive interference among spider mites: using behaviour and life-history effects to predict eco-evolutionary consequences".

On completion of the course, the students shall have acquired the following knowledge and understanding:

Lack of fertile land to feed the exponentially growing population, insufficient water availability and quality, changes in the flow of nutrients through the bio-geo-cycles (especially N and P) and climate and land use changes are impacting ecosystems and their capacity to deliver goods and services for humans. It is striking that all these issues interact around one common resource - SOIL and its biodiversity.

Phylogenetics is one of the scientific areas of Biology that has grown fast and evolved in methodological terms in the last years. Its applications go from the studies of the evolution of species and populations to the least expected, as the study of the origin of the AIDS virus or seasonal cycles of the flu. The course is aimed at students and professionals that intend to get started in phylogenetic analysis as well as researchers already with some experience wanting to deepen or update their knowledge in the field.

During recent decades we have witnessed a great development of bioinformatics that has led to the accumulation of a huge amount of biological information. The Bioinformatics and computational Biology aim at dealing with this large volume of data so that biological information can be extracted, generating scientific knowledge. Handling and mining big data is currently a subject of great interest and importance.