Pennsylvania Education Activities

Courses Taught

• Applied Spatial Ecology Methods for managing and analyzing ecological datasets are constantly evolving. Advances in technology have resulted in large spatial datasets for aquatic and terrestrial populations that requires data compilation and analysis for making sound resource management and conservation decisions. From traditional estimators of home range and resource selection in R to spatial epidemiology of disease in WinBUGS, this course will provide hands-on learning for manipulation and analyses of ecological datasets for a variety of taxa. You will develop skills in understanding and processing complex datasets while learning traditional and innovative methods for spatial data analysis. (David Walter 2013)
• Advances in Ecology Introduction to Current Topics of Research in Ecology (Duane Diefenbach 2012)
• Structured Decision Making and Adaptive Management of Natural Resources Introduction to Structured Decison Making and Adaptive Management. (Duane Diefenbach, Tyler Wagner 2012)
• See All ...

Training Offered

• An Introduction to Multilevel Models and their Applications in Forest, Fish, and Wildlife Management: Multilevel data structures are a common feature in forestry and fish and wildlife research. These data structures most often results in a lack of independence among observations (i.e., pseudoreplication). Ignoring multilevel data structures during analysis has implications for inference and decision making, leading to overly optimistic uncertainty estimates (e.g., underestimated standard errors of estimated parameters). Multilevel models not only account for nested data structures, but also provide a powerful approach for modeling the effects of predictors at multiple spatial scales and for partitioning variability into multiple spatial and temporal components.
  This course will provide an overview of multilevel models, including the concept and interpretation of random effects and variance components (day 1), and hands-on experience fitting models using the freely available programming environment R (day 2). (Tyler Wagner, Jason Hill, September 2012)
• An Introduction to R (Tyler Wagner August 2008)
• An introduction to the use of distance sampling to estimate the abundance of grassland songbirds. (Duane Diefenbach April 2004)
• See All ...