Day 1 “Big data in Biogeography”

• Welcome & Introduction

• Presentation of participants (3 - 5 minutes each, three slides)

• Introductory lecture: Recent developments in big data biogeography

• Literature group work and discussion

• Lecture & Hands on “Biodiversity databases”

• Design of the course projects

• Help with software setup if necessary

Day 2 “Biogeography through space - Recent biodiversity patterns”

• Lecture “Common biases, caveats and errors in biodiversity databases and tools to address them”

• Hands-on “Recent biodiversity patterns” in R (Obtaining occurrence records, data cleaning, exploring sampling bias)

• Lecture “Novel tools for big data biogeography: bioregionalization, species to area classification, automated conservation assessment”

• Hands-on: “Recent biogeography” (Species richness, taxon-specific bioregionalization, extracting environmental data)

Day 3 “Historical biogeography - reconstructing ancestral ranges”

• Hands-on “Data preparation”

• Lecture “Historical biogeography – methods to model the evolution of geographic ranges through time”

• Hands-on “Reconstructing ancestral ranges” (DEC, BioGeoBEARS, Biogeographic stochastic mapping, GeoSSE)

Day 4 “Fossil Biogeography”

• Lecture “Trait evolution”

• Hands on “Reconstructing ancestral ranges as continuous trait” (BITE)

• Guest lecture by Sara Varela on Species distribution in paleobiogeography

• Hands on “Reconstructing ancestral ranges as continuous trait” (BITE)

Day 5 “Putting it all together”

• Lecture “Fossil biogeography”

• Optional: Hands-on “Visualizing biogeographic results in R”

• Time for project work

• Student presentations

• Course evaluation and wrap up