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.
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.
Phylogeography is one of the recent scientific areas emergent from the dissemination of highthrouput technologies of sequencing starting in the 90’s of the XXth century, with the consequent development of intra-specific genetic variance analysis and its geographic distribution. The analysis of phylogeographic data allows to study the processes of population differentiation and the underlying evolutionary and demographic history. Applications of this body of knowledge go from conservation genetics to the study of the evolution of species and populations.
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.
The goal of this short course is to introduce the students to the main climate change research concepts and prepare them to use available information on scenarios, impacts and adaptation. Specific goals include:
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.
Nature-based approach to Design solutions for a more resilient future aims to support societies address a variety of environmental, social and economic challenges in sustainable ways. This approach relies on actions that are inspired by, supported by or copied from Nature. Nature-based solutions use the features and complex system processes of nature, such as its ability to store carbon and regulate water flow, in order to achieve desired outcomes, such as reduced disaster risk, improved human well-being and socio-ecological inclusiveness.
This course is designed for students with research interests in sustainable transition and participatory techniques. It imparts the students with a taste of research work through identifying research questions, formulating research structure, application of participatory holistic methodologies, and different communication forms and channels of research outcomes (i.e. presentation and publication).
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.
Overview: 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.
