Upcoming GIS Courses: Home Range Analyses, Creating Custom GIS Tools and Using QGIS In Biology

[GIS in Ecology]

GIS In Ecology will be running three GIS courses for biologists/ecologists over the next few months. These courses will be held in Glasgow in Scotland, and will be taught by Dr. Colin D. MacLeod, a biological researcher with more than 15 years experience in using GIS. These courses are:

 

1. An Introduction To Investigating The Home Ranges Of Individual Animals (15 – 16 February 2016): This course will provide an introduction to investigating the home ranges of individual animals using a GIS-based approach. It will cover how to create a minimum convex polygon (MCP), how to create a kernel density estimate (KDE) in environments with and without barriers to movements, how to create 50 and 95% percentage volume contours (PVCs) and how to select an appropriate bandwidth/h value. This course is aimed at anyone who wishes to use GIS to study the home ranges of animals in either the terrestrial or aquatic environments, even if they have little or no existing knowledge of GIS. It will primarily use ArcGIS software, but it will also cover the use of ArcMET and Geospatial Modelling Environment (GME) for home range analyses. Duration: 2 days. Cost: £295 (£200 for students, unwaged and those working for NGOs). Places will be limited to a maximum of 15 people and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. For more information on this course, visit www.gisinecology.com/Training_Course_Home_Range_February_2016.htm or email in...@GISinEcology.com. Places can also be booked through this email address.

 

2. An Introduction To Creating Custom GIS Tools For Biological Research (17 – 18 February 2016): This course will provide an introduction to the creation of custom GIS tools for use in all areas of biological research. Creating custom GIS tools for biological research allows you not only to automate frequently repeated tasks (saving time and reducing the risk of accidental processing errors), but it also allows non-GIS specialists to process and analyse data using standard protocols in a GIS-based environment by running a single easy-to-use tool. This means that creating custom GIS tool provides an effective way of expanding the pool of individuals within a research group or organisation who can carry out specific and complex GIS tasks. The course will consist of background session which will explain the principles of creating your own custom GIS tools, as well as practical exercises in which a number of example tools will be built and tested. There will also be the option of building your own custom tool to automate a task of your choice. This course assumes that you have at least a basic knowledge of GIS and is not aimed at complete beginners. It will use the ModelBuilder module of ESRI’s ArcGIS sofware to show how biologists can create custom GIS tools for use in their research. Duration: 2 days. Cost: £295 (£200 for students, unwaged and those working for NGOs). Places will be limited to a maximum of 15 people and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. For more information on this course, visit www.gisinecology.com/Training_Course_Custom_GIS_Tools_February_2016.htm  or email in...@GISinEcology.com. Places can also be booked through this email address.

 

3. An Introduction To Using QGIS In Biological Research (21 – 22 March 2016): QGIS (also known as Quantum GIS) is the leading, open source, and so freely available, GIS software (see www.qgis.org/en/site/about/index.html for more information), which can be run on Windows, Mac OS and Linux operating systems. This course will provide an introduction to the use of QGIS in biological research. It is aimed at those just starting to use GIS in their research and who have little or no existing knowledge of this subject area, those who are looking for a free, open source GIS solution for their biological research, and at existing users of commercial GIS software, such as ArcGIS, who wish to learn how to do GIS using QGIS software. Duration: 2 days. Cost: £295 (£200 for students, unwaged and those working for NGOs). Places will be limited to a maximum of 15 people and will be filled on a first come, first served basis. For more information on this course, visit www.gisinecology.com/Training_Course_QGIS_For_Biologists_March_2016.htm  or email in...@GISinEcology.com. Places can also be booked through this email address.

 

Finally, there are also a very limited number of spaces still available on our January 2016 courses titled ‘An Introduction To Using GIS In Marine Biology’ (18 – 20 January 2016) and ‘An introduction To Using Species Distribution Modelling In the Marine Environment’ (21 – 22 January 2016). For more information on these courses, visit www.gisinecology.com/Training_Course_Glasgow_January_2016.htm, or email in...@GISinEcology.com. Places can also be booked through this email address.

 

All the best,

 

Colin

 

[Audrey Delsink]

Dear Prof. Colin

I was very excited to find this forum and it has already assisted me with some niggling issues. I live remotely, on a game reserve, in South Africa. Are there any online courses available? As I am completing my PhD, and my GIS experience is limited, this would be very beneficial.

Kind regards

Audrey

[GIS in Ecology]

Hi Audrey,

Thanks for the post, and I'm glad to hear that you're finding this forum useful. 

In terms of online courses, this is something we're currently developing, and we hope to have to first online courses, based around on-demand videos, by some point over the summer. These will start with some basic GIS courses, but once they are up and running, we'll be developing more advanced ones, like an online version of our home range course.

Anyway, when these finally become available, I'll post an announcement on this forum to let people know.

Good luck with your Ph.D.

All the best,

Colin

[Angelo Poupard]

Hi there,

Will you be conducting courses in Glasgow at the future ?

Many thanks,

Angelo

[GIS in Ecology]

Hi Angelo,

Unfortunately, since we have primarily shifted from primarily using ArcGIS for our training courses to primarily using QGIS, we no longer offer this home range course (there are a couple of topics that it covers that we've not managed to work out how to do in QGIS yet - mostly related to worknig out kernel density estimates in areas with barriers to movement) . I hope that at some point in the future this will change, but at the moment we don't have any plans to run this course again at any point in the near future.

Sorry about this.

All the best,

Colin