Course Info

Course Objectives

The goal of this class is to provide students a basic understanding of how populations and communities change through time and to provide fundamental concepts of how to forecast those changes. By the end of the semester, students will:

  1. Have an appreciation of the dynamics and time scales of change that populations and communities exhibit.
  2. Understand the basic concepts of forecasting that apply across fields and the challenges within ecology
  3. Apply time series concepts to working with ecological time series data
  4. Be able to fit models to data and use those models to make forecasts

General Course Structure and Expectations

This course is a mixture of class discussion of the primary literature and hands-on experience involving data and computing. Completing assigned readings, intellectual engagement with topics, discussion participation, and completion of R-tutorials are the main ways students will learn in this class. Because of the way it is taught at the University of Florida the schedule is designed around two one-hour course periods each week. The first period is primarily concept discussion days and the second perio is typically an R tutorial or other tools discussion.

In-person or online

The course is primarily designed to be in-person, but we have had success with a modest number of remote participants. R tutorials are easy remotely. The more challenging piece is making group discussions work effectively for remote students.

Paper discussions:

This discussion is generally centered around the discussion questions that are provided in advance but may also expand beyond them. Our goal is to produce a classroom environment where everyone is comfortable participating in class discussions. Instructors should manage discussions so that everyone has a chance to contribute and make sure that folks who are less comfortable interjecting get a chance to participate. We recommend encouraging student help in making sure that everyone in the class gets a chance to contribute.

For students who don’t feel comfortable talking during class we recommend the option to provide written responses to the assigned class discussion questions.

To help prepare students for paper discussions, and help professors understand things that need clarification during class, we have students describe things that confused them about reading the paper the night before the paper discussion via a small LMS assignment.

R-tutorials

R-tutorials consist of live coding in class where students follow along with the instructor, do informal exercises on their own, and ask questions.

Completed R-tutorials are submitted on Canvas and graded for completion.

Course Materials

  1. All reading materials are made available through the course website. Most, but not all, of them are openly available.
  2. Computers: Laptops with R and Rstudio installed are required for the R-tutorial part of the course.