Course Overview

Both climate change 🌡️ and anthropogenic activities 🏭 are pushing many species to the brink of extinction or altering their known ranges in an unprecedented manner globally 🌍. In this short course, I intend to introduce the basics, intermediate and advanced concepts of species distribution modeling 🧑‍💻. It is a concept that models a species' niche and projects it over geographic space to display the potential suitable habitat of the species 🗺️ and helps in planning conservation strategies accordingly. Towards the end of the course, we will use our trained ecological niches to make predictions for the species in the future 🕐.

Course Contents

1. Introduction to species distribution modeling

2. Applications of species distribution modeling

3. Key tools in species distribution modeling

4. Species occurrence data

5. Environmental data for species distribution modeling

6. Visualization of occurrence and the environmental data

7. Algorithms for building species distribution models

8. Uncertainty in species distribution modeling

9. Evaluation of species distribution models

10. Best/Optimal model selection

11. Model transfer over time and space

12. Model comparisons

13. Reproducibility 

Prerequisites

Participants are expected to have basic programming skills in R. Skills in raster image processing would also be handy but not explicitly necessary. All participants should have computers connected to the internet with both R and RStudio installed as well as a suite of packages that will be provided at the beginning of the course. It is also important to have Google Meet set up apriori.

Dates and Schedule

The sessions will be held on Xth and Yth Month Year.

From 15:00 - 19:00 CET. 

Total course hours: 8 

Language

English

Places

The total number of participants in the course will be 30 based on registration order. All participants who shall participate and submit their projects within 2 weeks of the course completion will receive a certificate of participation.

Coordinator

Dr. Wyclife Agumba Oluoch

Bonn, University

Contacts

Fees and Discounts

Early bird (Until DATE):

€ xxx

(€ xxx for participants from UN LDCs)

Regular (From DATE until the 30th participant):

€ xxx

(€ xxx for participants from UN LDCs)

Prices include VAT

Upon registration, you will receive a confirmation e-mail of your acceptance on the course and invoice. Payment is not required during registration but should be completed before the commencement of the course. All fees collected will be used to enhance programming literacy in Africa.

Discount

Apart from the mentioned offers, participants from Kenya will receive an additional 20% discount.