In September 2019 the SCAR Expert Group on Antarctic Biodiversity Informatics (EG-ABI) partnered with the rOpenSci project and Antarctic Biodiversity Portal to organise a short course on tools for Southern Ocean spatial analysis and modelling using R.
The course taught participants how to retrieve, model and interpret species occurrence data from the Southern Ocean using R-tools developed through the Antarctic R community. It included hands-on sessions and was targeted at Polar Early Career Scientists, but open to any research students or scientists who use these tools in their work.
Feedback from the course has been extremely positive. Below is a selection of testimonials from participants about the course.
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I am a PhD Student that has been working in SDMs since my Biologist degree a little bit by myself, some papers and sharing with colleagues. So, working with the excellent mentors this course had was the perfect guidance for keep on going with SDM, gaining confidence and experience. We started from a very basic step of SDMs going up to running our own specie distribution model. All amazing. Let’s start modelling! – Camila Neder
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It was a brilliantly run course in a lovely venue. We were taught the content with an engaging non-dry approach with many sci-fi memes to keep it engaging and to provide a familiar hook upon which we could latch this new knowledge. With four teachers for a classroom of ~ 20 students, help was always available and each instructor had their own particular expertise which led to many valuable insights when discussing the same problem sets with different people. In addition to this, having two days where we could work on our own research problem in the presence of experts was highly rewarding. The instructors were knowledgeable, approachable and overall great teachers. – Prem Gill
Photos:
Top: EG-ABI group
Bottom: @NederCami on Twitter