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Measuring and analyzing biodiversity - MB162P46

Title:	Measuring and analyzing biodiversity
Czech title:	Měření a analýza biodiverzity
Guaranteed by:	Department of Ecology (31-162)
Faculty:	Faculty of Science
Actual:	from 2023 to 2023
Semester:	summer
E-Credits:	3
Examination process:	summer s.:combined
Hours per week, examination:	summer s.:5/0, Ex [DS]
Capacity:	10
Min. number of students:	5
4EU+:	no
Virtual mobility / capacity:	no
State of the course:	not taught
Language:	English
Note:	enabled for web enrollment the course is taught as cyclical

Guarantor:	prof. Mgr. Vladimír Remeš, Ph.D.

Opinion survey results Examination dates Schedule

Annotation -

Last update: RNDr. Veronika Sacherová, Ph.D. (29.04.2022)

As scientists and citizens, we want to ask and answer big questions: What drives biodiversity? How does it
change in space and time? Does it decline? If so, is it due to human activities? However, to answer these
questions, we must be able to measure and analyze biodiversity - precisely and accurately. This course is
designed to teach students to do just that.
It is a practical course in that it will be focused on teaching students how to work with real data on biodiversity.
However, to provide a proper motivation, we introduce each topic with a short lecture in terms of its history, the
theory behind it, and challenges for measurement and analysis. In the practicals (running in blocks), we will
analyze real data in the statistical software R. We will learn about different libraries for the analysis of a given type
of data, proper implementation of methods, and interpretation of results.
Students enrolling in the course should have passed an introductory course of ecology. A basic knowledge of the R
software would be useful, but it is not necessary (we will learn everything needed during practicals). To make
things clear, we note that this is neither a course in theoretical ecology (analysis of mathematical models) nor
ecological statistics (analyzing statistical relationships among variables), but that we will try and quantify important
concepts of ecological thinking, which is necessary for their critical evaluation.

Literature -

Last update: RNDr. Veronika Sacherová, Ph.D. (29.04.2022)

Cadotte, M.W. and Davies, T.J. (2016) Phylogenies in ecology: A guide to concepts and methods. Princeton Univ. Press.

Gardener, M. (2014) Community ecology: Analytical methods using R and Excel. Pelagic Publishing.

Gotelli, N.J. and Ellison, A.M. (2018) A primer of ecological statistics, 2ed. Sinauer Associates.

Gotelli, N.J. and Graves, G.R. (1996) Null models in ecology. Smithsonian Institution Press.

Kéry, M. and Royle, J.A. (2016) Applied hierarchical modeling in ecology, vol. 1. Academic Press.

Krebs, C.J. (1999) Ecological methodology. Benjamin/Cummings.

Magurran, A.E. (2004) Measuring biological diversity. Blackwell Science.

Magurran, A.E. and McGill, B.J. (2011) Biological diversity: Frontiers in measurement and assessment. Oxford Univ. Press.

Swenson, N.G. (2014) Functional and phylogenetic ecology in R. Springer.

Requirements to the exam -

Last update: RNDr. Veronika Sacherová, Ph.D. (29.04.2022)

Analysis of a dataset in R software and writing up a report

Syllabus -

Last update: prof. Mgr. Vladimír Remeš, Ph.D. (12.01.2023)

Each year only several selected topics from the following list will be covered.

Species density and richness
Scaling of species richness, species-area relationships
Species diversity and species-abundance distributions
Detectability, abundance, and species distributions
Spatial dispersion and species co-occurrence
Functional and phylogenetic diversity
Ecological niches: niche width, overlap, and specialization
Null models in ecology