ECNU Summer School: Synthesizing Biodiversity (August 28-September 1)

Instructors:
Prof. Jonathan Chase, Dr. Shane Blowes, Minghua Shen
German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv)

Overview of the course: 
The main purpose of the course is to introduce students to the questions, hypotheses, calculation and analysis of biodiversity and its response to natural and anthropogenic drivers. Biodiversity is a complex, multidimensional and scale-dependent variable. As such, it is not a straightforward measure to simply calculate and analyze. A number of considerations are necessary to estimate biodiversity and understand what the metric means. It’s even more complicated to compare biodiversity across space and time. And synthesizing biodiversity responses to drivers across studies or systems is more complicated still. Without a deep consideration of the issues associated with biodiversity and its meaning and measurement, results of these comparisons can be meaningless (or worse).

In this week-long course, we will introduce students to the problems associated with measuring, comparing and synthesizing biodiversity. We will use a series of lectures, readings, and exercises to do so.  There will be computer coding (in R software), but the main purpose is less about learning the tools, and more about learning the concepts and approaches that are necessary to make meaningful measures and comparisons of biodiversity in a comparative and synthetic way. 


Brief Syllabus 

Day 1–August 28. Introductions and biodiversity 
i) Introductions and Ice Breaker
ii) Student presentations
iii) Field data collection
iv) Discussion of measuring biodiversity in nature


Day 2–August 29. Biodiversity definitions and measurements
i) Biodiversity: What is it, how do we compare it, why should we care?
ii) Practical exercise for comparing biodiversity
iii) Metrics and measures of biodiversity

Day 3–August 30. Comparing biodiversity within and across studies (synthesis) 
i) Synthesis: Important, but complicated (and messy)
ii) Evaluate published biodiversity syntheses 
iii) meta-analysis of biodiversity: Good, bad, ugly

Day 4–August 31. How to ask questions and develop hypotheses (for biodiversity synthesis) 

i) What is an appropriate question?
ii) what is a hypothesis (and how is it testable and falsifiable)? 
iii) How to ask questions and test hypotheses for biodiversity
iv) Tools for testing hypotheses for biodiversity 

Day 5–September 1. Putting it all together (practical work)
i) Practical experience developing questions and hypotheses for biodiversity
ii) Developing protocols for evaluating questions and hypotheses for biodiversity 
iv) Independent work