*Unlock the Power of Marine Mammal Community Data:Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Communities Using VEGAN* https://prstats.org/course/multivariate-analysis-of-ecological-communities-u... Marine ecosystems are complex, dynamic, and species-rich—yet challenging to analyse due to patchy detections, wide-ranging movements, variable survey effort, and multi-species interactions. Whether you work on cetacean community structure, pinniped foraging assemblages, acoustic species guilds, or broad-scale biodiversity responses to environmental change, robust multivariate tools are essential. This five-day live online course provides a comprehensive, applied introduction to multivariate analysis using the widely adopted R package *vegan*, with direct relevance to the types of community-level data common in marine mammal science. ------------------------------ What the course covers *Handling ecological community data* Learn how to prepare species-by-site matrices, manage heterogeneous survey data, transform variables, and compute distance measures suited to acoustic detections, transect data, or encounter rates. *Diversity indices and community metrics* Compute and interpret measures such as richness, Shannon diversity, evenness, and species-abundance distributions—useful for assessing community shifts in response to climate, noise, fishing pressure, or habitat change. *Clustering, classification, and ordination* Master PCA, NMDS, RDA, CCA and other techniques to explore patterns in multi-species occurrence data, identify community guilds, detect spatial structure, and quantify ecological gradients in marine systems. *Environmental drivers and gradients* Integrate predictors such as oceanography, bathymetry, prey indices, anthropogenic disturbance, or temporal trends to uncover relationships between marine mammal communities and their environments. *Reproducible analysis workflows in R* Build transparent, publication-ready scripts for analysis, visualisation, and interpretation, enabling consistent workflows across projects and teams. ------------------------------ Why this matters for marine mammal research Marine mammal datasets are often high-dimensional, sparse, and strongly influenced by environmental gradients. This course equips you to: - Identify ecological structure in multi-species detection data - Quantify shifts in community composition across space, seasons, or environmental conditions - Analyse acoustic or visual survey data at a community level - Detect species assemblages, guilds, or habitat associations - Build robust, defensible workflows for conservation and management reporting - Produce ordination and diversity outputs widely used in ecological publications and marine monitoring programmes
From broad-scale biodiversity assessments to targeted multi-species studies, the tools taught in this course help you make sense of complex marine ecological data.
Who should attend Ideal for marine mammal ecologists, conservation practitioners, environmental consultants, MSc/PhD students, and data analysts working with community-level datasets. A basic understanding of R is recommended, including data import, manipulation, and foundational statistics. ------------------------------ Format & practicalities - Five days of live online teaching (approximately 7 hours per day) - Bring your own datasets if you wish; instructors will help tailor methods to your project - All sessions recorded and available for later review - Fee: £485 ------------------------------ *Take the next step in your analytical journey* If you are ready to deepen your understanding of community-level patterns in marine mammal ecology and move beyond simple summaries into powerful multivariate inference, this course provides the structured, practical training you need. -- Oliver Hooker PhD. PR stats