Workshops

Please find the workshops for th 2026 edition of the RT Ecostat annual meetings below.

We limit each workshop to 20 participants.

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Workshop 1: Species distribution modelling (SDM) - biomod2

Presenter: Maya Guéguen (LECA, maya.gueguen@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr)

Max number of participants: 20

Summary: Species distribution models (SDM) are statistical tools that are often used in ecology and enable us to establish links between species and their environment. biomod2 is an R package that offers a flexible workflow to build SDMs using different types of observation data (presence/absence, presence only, count data, absolute or relative abundace data, classes) that can be modelled using several algorithms and later combined in an ensemble model according to the user's need. 

This workshop will contain three parts: 

1. a general presentation to explore why we may want to use SDMs, to present the structure of the biomod2 R package (its functionalities and potential methodological obstacles that usedrs may encounter, like the selection of pseudo-absences, cross-validation, tuning), and share a few good practice tips;
2. an exploration of the different functionalities through a test dataset;
3. time for practical questions or to discuss issues with your own dataset if you have one. 

Public: Anyone who is interested in developing species distribution models.

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Workshop 2: Ecological Trajectory Analysis course

Presenter: Nicolas Djeghri (LEMAR, nicolas.djeghri@univ-brest.f)

Max number of participants: 20

Summary:  Ecological Trajectory Analysis (ETA) is a descriptive framework allowing exploring ecological temporal patterns, putting emphasis on quantifying their dynamics. ETA formalizes ecological dynamics as trajectories, defined geometrically in a multidimensional space. This space is itself defined by a distance (or dissimilarity) coefficient accommodating diverse representations of ecological entities adapted to various data types (e.g. Bray-Curtis or Hellinger dissimilarities for communities, Euclidean distances of standardized abiotic variables for environments). ETA provides metrics to describe and compare
trajectories geometrically (e.g. directionality, similarity between two trajectories, relative movement of two trajectories). Thus, ETA displaces the typical focus of ecological analysis from the description of static states to a direct description of temporal dynamics, opening up new ways to approach ecological data. ETA has already found applications in community ecology, stable isotope
ecology, conservation, or paleoecology and has been extended to study cyclical dynamics and ecological dynamic regimes. ETA is implemented in software with the ecotraj R package.

With this course, you will learn the fundamental concepts and possibilities offered by ETA and how to implement ETA in your own work using ecotraj. You will find more information on the ecotraj website: https://emf-creaf.github.io/ecotraj/

Required knowledge : Familiarity with basic multivariate statistics (PCA, PCoA), and their application in the R language.

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Workshop 3 : Surprise...

Summary : The organization and the content of this workshop will be determined according to demand. It may also be a duplicate of one of the workshops above.