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