About

Welcome to ES-631 Envirometrics

There are two primary sets of information on this site:

1. The background and conceptual foundation for ecological forecasting and dynamics, which focuses on reading and engaging with the primary scientific literature.
2. The computational tools for working with, modeling, and making forecasts from (mostly time-series) data.

Envirometrics is a semester-long course to introduce students to the fundamentals of ecological forecasting & dynamics. This course implements paper-based discussion to introduce students to concepts and ideas and R-based tutorials for hands-on application and training. The course material includes a reading list with prompting questions for discussions, teachers notes for guiding discussions, lecture notes for live coding demonstrations, and video presentations of all R tutorials. The course is structured around two sessions per week, with most weeks consisting of a one hour paper discussion session and a 1-2 hour session focused on applications in R.

Ecological forecasting is an emerging field that aims to project the current state of nature into uncertain futures. This goal of understanding and modeling nature benefits from traditional ecological approaches that assess processes by modeling known outcomes from short-term experiments or historical data, but also involves unique tools, methods, and ways of thinking. Many ecologists have limited exposure to all of the core concepts necessary to engage in forecasting including:

• understanding of ecological dynamics the iterative cycle of model fitting, evaluation, and improvement and

• assessing and communicating uncertainty in forecasts