Unlock the Power of Marine Mammal Community Data:
Multivariate Analysis of Ecological Communities Using VEGAN
https://prstats.org/course/multivariate-analysis-of-ecological-communities-using-vegan-vgnr08/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.