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.

In preparation for the new decade, society urgently needs to implement actions that can make us more resilient to the challenges of the 21st century. Societies that are well-adapted to the changing climate are critical to minimise present and future risks and vulnerabilities, as well as maximise opportunities.

Por Robert Park (Judith & David Coffey Chair of Sustainable Agriculture The University of Sydney Faculty of Science, School of Life & Environmental Sciences Plant Breeding Institute, The University of Sydney).

This course introduces the field of island biogeography, a discipline that has long influenced other research areas such as macroecology, community ecology, evolution and conservation biology. This course covers the main aspects of island biogeography, and on completion of the course the students shall have acquired knowledge and understanding on:

Under the general framework of Global Change Ecology, the goal of this course is to provide the participants with the most recent and practical knowledge on the use of Functional Diversity. This includes the selection of functional traits and calculation of Functional Diversity Indexes. Examples of the application of this knowledge will be given regarding Ecological Indicators and Ecosystem Services.

The specific objectives are:

The objective of this course is to introduce participants to the details of communication and writing scientific publications. The main emphasis is on the most common form, the “primary scientific paper”, but other forms will be covered. Matters related to oral presentations, poster preparation and proposal writing will also be discussed. Thus participants will become familiar with the forms of presenting new findings to various scientific forums.

Objectives: To introduce participants to the details of communicating science to non-specialized audiences, including, but not exclusive to, public and private stakeholders, students and teachers, and media professionals. The course will particularly address the design, organisation, implementation and impact assessment of public engagement activities such as exhibitions, science festivals or games. At the end of the course, students should be able to develop and produce small-budget events or products to communicate scientific results and ideas.

Natural history museums are privileged spaces for seminal research on different subjects of biological sciences such as biodiversity, evolution, ecology, biogeography and taxonomy. This crucial role is due to the fact that they represent biological diversity repositories becoming huge libraries of information on Earth living organisms. The long-term sampling through various decades renders tonatural history collections an historic perspective that allows reconstructing a “memory”, sometimes secular, of natural patterns and processes.

There are thousands of totally sequenced genomes freely available in the Internet. The number keeps on growing as at least one genome sequence is released every day. Large-scale sequencing requires bioinformatics analysis, whose algorithms will be the aim of this course, and that underlie the generation of reliable databases. Algorithms are also the basis of reliable sequence databases generation. An intelligent analysis of these databases allows the extraction of information and scientific knowledge.