Applied Spatial Ecology

Catalog description

Students will develop skills in understanding and processing complex datasets while learning traditional and innovative methods for spatial data analysis. The purpose of this course is to assist researchers on methods for data management and analysis using a state-of-the-art statistical program after data has been collected in the field or for designing field experiments. The course focuses on wildlife/fisheries research, both basic and applied, that rely on large ecological datasets that provide unique opportunities to explicitly incorporate sources of spatial and temporal variability into understanding motivations for an organism's movements, resource selection, subpopulation structuring, or presence in a landscape. The impetus behind this course and resulting manual was to import data from spreadsheet software, import Geographical Information Systems (GIS) layers, and conduct statistical analysis of datasets all in a single software platform. In the past several decades, advancements in data acquisition have resulted in datasets often with thousands of records. Concurrent with these advancements in acquisition, methods of handling and manipulating large datasets, GIS capabilities, and methods of estimators for home range, movements, resource selection, and spatial epidemiology have increased dramatically.