FOL visits Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM/CSIC) and Barcelona Ocean

Last week Sissi joined a four-day specialized course on statistical modeling of species distribution. The course is organized by Barcelona Ocean, which is a joint initiative of InvestigAdHoc and Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM, Institut de Ciències de Mar). Barcelona Ocean regularly organizes the specialized trainings in marine sciences to professionals and researchers.

The course focused on a Bayesian approach to link information on the presence/absence or abundance of a species to environmental variables, and to predict the likely distribution of the species in unsampled locations. Two lecturers are from the Centro Oceanográfico Murcia and the University of Valencia.

About 20 scientists working on marine issues from all over Spain attended the course. The lecture room at ICM is nicely located, overseeing the popular Barcelona beach. During the breaks, trainees took the opportunities to get out of the room with heavy mathematical equations and R codes, and enjoyed the breeze of wind and the sound of ocean.