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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.

Reading Responses

Reading responses should identify the central question, the spatial data or model used, one strength, one limitation, and one discussion question.

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.

Milestones

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

Final Project Structure

  • A GitHub repository with notebooks containing analysis code
  • One clean Jupyter notebook
  • A 5–8 page scientific report
  • A 10-minute presentation
  • A README explaining how to reproduce the analysis

Final Report 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.
  • Reproducibility statement.