Por Ian Baldwin (Director of the Department of Molecular Ecology, Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology).

Por Anna Sapfo (Department of Computational Biology, University of Lausanne, Switzerland and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland).

Por Scott R. Miller (Professor at University of Montana).

Por Sara Magalhães (Assistant Professor, Evolutionary Ecology Group - cE3c).

With this course, we aim at providing the participants with the basics of lichen biology and ecology, biomonitoring and data analysis methods to allow the use of lichens for the interpretation of the environmental conditions and the development of a responsible scientific-based environmental management.

Currently, climate changes or alterations are known to be reflected on the stable isotope ratios of Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Carbon, Oxygen and Sulphur present in atmospheric gas forms, fresh or ocean water, as well as in plants and animals and organic matter in the soil. Samples from those matrices can provide a record for such changes across a given length of time and / or space. Also, ecological and physiological processes often reflect on stable isotope ratios, again setting a record in plant, animal or other living tissues.

This course offers an overview of the different ways to measure biodiversity, and provides tips for the stratification of primary biodiversity data and the construction of variables that describe its various facets. It also includes an in-depth review of the different types of data used to measure biodiversity and their problems and limitations.

Date: June 24th, 2019 to June 28th, 2019
Deadline for Applications: May 31st, 2019

This is a mostly practical course offering an overview on different community ecology and macroecological methods and software. These will include all steps of a research project, from the optimal sampling of communities to process inference from large-scale patterns of taxon, phylogenetic and functional diversity.