Assignments

Weekly Applied Exercises

Weekly exercises should be submitted as reproducible notebooks or scripts with rendered figures and brief interpretation. Each exercise should include enough metadata for another student to understand the data sources, preprocessing choices, and computational environment.

Paper Discussions

Throughout the semester each participant will choose one paper that deals with spatial biodiversity patterns and they will lead a paper discussion for the class. The discussion leader should identify the central question, the spatial data or model used, the strengths and limitation of the data/models, and one discussion question or future direction idea.

Final Project

The final project asks students to complete a spatial biodiversity analysis from question to communication. Projects may focus on species distributions, biodiversity metrics, endemism, phylogenetic or functional diversity, connectivity, prioritization, or another approved topic.

I envision the 'final project' as being an opportunity for each participant to actually work on data associated with one of their projects. The goal would be to wrap up the semester with a more or less complete suite of analyses, and potentially a draft methods/results section for a paper.

Milestones

Project idea memo.
Data acquisition and cleaning report.
Predictor inventory or metric design.
First model or biodiversity surface.
Model comparison or analysis checkpoint.
Final report and presentation.

Final Project Structure

A GitHub repository with notebooks containing analysis code
Jupyter notebooks sufficient to reproduce the analyses
A README explaining how to reproduce the analysis
Publication quality figures and a draft methods/results section of a paper
A 10-minute presentation

Final Presentation Template

Research question and ecological motivation.
Study area and taxa.
Data sources and preprocessing.
Methods and assumptions.
Results with maps and figures.
Sensitivity, uncertainty, and limitations.
Interpretation and next steps.