This course will be delivered by Dr Marco Scotti at Myuna Bay Sport and Recreation, Wangi Road, Myuna Bay, New South Wales 2264 Australia, from the 6th – 10th May 2019.
Course overview:
The course is intended to provide the participants theoretical knowledge and practical skills for the study of food webs. First, lessons and exercises will introduce basic principles of network theory. Second, ecological examples will be focused on binary food webs, networks depicting who eats whom in ecosystems. Algorithms quantifying either global food web properties or single species features within the trophic network will be introduced. Third, we will study how the architecture of the food webs can be used to investigate robustness to biodiversity loss, thus helping to predict cascading extinction events. Fourth, ecosystem network analysis (ENA), a suite of matrix manipulation routines for the study of energy/matter circulation in ecosystems, will be presented. Then, we will apply the qualitative algorithm of loop analysis to describe how the impacts of perturbations (e.g. overfishing, species invasion and global warming) may propagate through food web structure. Finally, we will learn how to visualize food web graphs to illustrate their features in an intuitive and fancy way.
For more information: https://www.prstatistics.com/course/network-analysis-for-ecologists-using-r-ntwa03/