Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Data
Advanced course
2 February - 9 February 2014
9 February - 16 February 2014
České Budějovice, Czech Republic
This advanced version of our course will be offered in two independent runs, each spanning 7 days (with 6 days of work) and it will focus on the recent developments of the analysis of multivariate data. This course is designed for researchers and students in all fields of biology and nature protection, with intermediate knowledge of the Canoco 4.x software. Course participants are expected to bring with them the results of their own projects and the course schedule offers sufficient time to apply the methods mastered during the course to their own datasets, including consultations offered by both lecturers.
This is an intensive course and we will help to participants to prepare their input data in advance, so that they can start working on their analyses since the first day of the course.
We will provide in-depth lectures and practicals on the following topics:
- Advanced aspects of constrained ordination, including non-trivial permutation tests, stepwise selection of explanatory variables and variation partitioning.
- Using functional traits to enhance understanding of biotic communities and their response to environmental factors and experimental manipulation.
- Methods to compare different biotic communities, to account for spatial autocorrelation in data and to model the spatial variation of biotic communities
- Classification and regression trees (CART) methodology will be introduced, as well as the multivariate classification using the TWINSPAN method
- All practicals and individual work on mini-projects will be done with the new Canoco 5 software