Hey everybody! Nick Matzke and I are working up a course to run down some of the standard methods in ecological and evolutionary biogeography, including some of the new methods he and I are working on for integrating evolution into species distribution models. There are still some bits of it in flux, but at the bare minimum this is a chance to learn BioGeoBears and ENMTools (via the R package, which is developing rapidly) from their respective sources. Our first iteration of the course will be this November/December in Barcelona. Feel free to contact me if your institution would be interested in hosting a similar workshop sometime in 2017 or later, and please do enroll for Barcelona if you're interested!
Here's the official course announcement:
Nick Matzke and Dan Warren will be teaching a course entitled "Model-based Statistical Inference in Ecological and Evolutionary Biogeography" in Barcelona from November 28 to Dec 2 this year.
This course will cover the theory and practice of widely used methods in evolutionary and ecological biogeography, namely ecological niche modelling / species distribution modelling, and ancestral range estimation on phylogenies.
The course will cover both the practical challenges to using these techniques (the basics of R, obtaining and processing geographical occurrence data from GBIF, setting up and using the models), and the assumptions that various models and methods make.
R packages we will use include rgbif, dismo, ENMTools, and BioGeoBEARS.
Finally, this course will introduce several new approaches being developed by the instructors for linking ecological and evolutionary models.
For more details or to enroll, please see the Transmitting Science web site.
http://www.transmittingscience.org/courses/biog/statistical-biogeography/
