Natasja van Gestel, PhD
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COURSES

The three planned courses outlined below will expand the toolbox of the quantitative ecologist and teach basics on global change ecology.

Basic R

Course description
The programming language R is a useful, open-source research tool for a variety of disciplines, and increasingly used in the field of ecology. In this introductory R course, I will teach the basics of how to program in R. This will benefit students in two ways: (1) programming principles used in R apply to other programming languages such as Matlab or C++; (2) learning how to perform statistical analyses on large data sets frees students up from considerable computational efforts that would otherwise occur when using software such as Excel.

Expected learning outcomes
  • Learn how to write basic functions that can be applied to data sets
  • Learn how to do basic statistical analyses (requires prior knowledge on basic statistics)
  • Create figures using the basic plotting package in R.

Advanced R for ecologists

Course description
The prerequisite for this advanced course is "Basic R" described above. In this course I will expand upon the Basic R course by teaching students how to use R packages that are useful for an ecologist. These include packages such as 'vegan' and 'plyr'. Furthermore, the 'ggplot2' package is a package designed to create high-quality figures for publications. This course is essential for the flourishing ecologist.

Expected learning outcomes
  • Learn how to analyze subsets of data in large data sets
  • Learn how to do ordinations on community data
  • Learn how to perform multivariate analyses
  • Create professional figures for use in publications

Climate Change

Course description
In this course I will discuss how climate has changed in the past, current state and future direction. Furthermore, I will discuss how organisms have been able to adapt to natural fluctuations in climate. Lastly, I will discuss the design and results from a variety of climate experiments, specifically the long-term ecological research (LTER) experiments and multi-factorial experiments such as Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiments. At the end of the course, students will write and present a proposal on research that they would like to conduct to answer how one (or more) climate change factor affect(s) their variable of interest.

Expected learning outcomes
  • Learn about causes of climate change (past and present)
  • Learn basic information about Earth System Models
  • Adaptations of organisms (mostly plants, soil microbes, birds and mammals)
  • Learn about responses of organisms in climate change experiments, i.e. what are expectations for the future?
  • Learn basic information about experimental design
  • Enhance communication skills, both in written and verbal form
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