International Science School

ANIMOVE 2015
Animal Movement Analysis for Conservation

Smithsonian - Mason School of Conservation, Virginia, U.S.

After the success and positive feedback of the Summer School last year, Animove 2015  (Animal Movement Analysis for Conservation) will take place at the Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation (SMSC). It is located at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Virginia, USA.

The school provides intensive training in a wide range of computational disciplines in order to deal with linking approaches like animal movement with environmental factors. It addresses conservation issues using remote sensing and modelling.

Participants will gain new skills in hands-on exercises including data collection and management, analyses and modelling. Lectures will be held by noted conservation scientists, movement ecologists, and remote sensing experts.To deepen the new knowledge, students will work in small groups on their own conservation project.

Only Open Source software will be used to allow participants to apply them after the Summer School as well. Programs learnt will be: R (raster, sp, dismo, rgdal etc.), GRASS (with add-ons like r.pi), QGIS.

The workshops will deal with (amongst others):

• Vector-raster intersection
• Derivation of relevant environmental variables
• Vegetation Indices
• (Un-) Supervised land cover classification
• Fractional cover analysis
• SDMs (GLM, GAM, MaxEnt, SVM)
• Home-range/resource selection
• BCPA
• Dynamics Brownian Bridges
• Analysis and prediction of animal movements depending on environmental data
• Visualisation of tracking and environmental data

By the end of the Summer School, participants will be able to:

• Know what and how conservation can be helped by applying remote sensing and modelling
• Apply remote sensing analysis and use satellite data to analyse land cover status
• Collect field data using GPS and tracking devices and analyse them inside a GIS
• Design and perform analysis using spatial data and spatial analysis techniques
• Conduct time-series land cover analysis using satellite imagery
• Link species presence/absence or abundance data to spatial data
• Apply animal movement model and link them to environmental data
• Apply advanced spatial analysis techniques to real-world conservation and ecology problems

Instructors:

• Martin Wegmann (LSFE-UW, CEOS, DLR)
• Kamran Safi (MPI-O)
• Nathalie Pettorelli (ZSL)
• Peter Leimgruber (SCBI)
• Justin Calabrese (SCBI)
• Ned Horning (AMNH)

Download the course flyer (from last year): http://animove.org/images/animove2014/AniMove_2014_small.pdf

Dates

Summer School: April 12, 2015 at 8:00 am - April 25, 2015 at 5:00 pm

Application deadline: January 2015

For more information visit: www.animove.org

Sponsors and organising institutions