News Archive

The Faculty is pleased to announce that Pierre Legendre is back to UWA to take up his appointment as Vice-Chancellors Visiting Professor at the University of Western Australia.

Professor Pierre Legendre is a world authority in spatial ecology and environmental studies. Through his very productive career, he has developed a number of tools, which are widely used by ecologist and environmental scientists and engineers around the world.

In 2008, Professor Legendre accepted the distinguished appointment by Professor Alan Robson as Vice-Chancellor Visiting Professor to The University of Western Australia.

Pierre will be at UWA this year for over 3 months and will be based at the School of Environmental Systems Engineering.  During this visit Pierre will have the opportunity to interact with all of you and discuss common research interests.

All researchers and graduate students who are interested in spatial analyses of environmental data as well as multi-species communities or other types of multivariate data are invited to attend the event.

The course will present advanced statistical methods to approach these problems, including the study of multiscale spatial patterns displayed by natural or manthreatened communities or environments. A starting point of this interaction is the upcoming Master Class, which is a 5 days advanced and intensive course titled "Recent Advances in Spatial Analysis of Multivariate Environmental Data: Theory and Practice".

The Workshop will cover:
DAY 1:
1) Introduction to data analysis.
2) Ordination in reduced space: principal component analysis (PCA), principal coordinate analysis (PCoA), correspondence analysis (CA).
3) Transformation of species abundance data tables prior to linear analyses.

DAY 2
4) Measures of similarity and distance, especially for community composition data.
5) Multiple regression. R-square and adjusted R-square. Partial regression.

DAY 3
6) Statistical testing by permutation.
7) Canonical redundancy analysis (RDA) and canonical correspondence analysis (CCA). Multivariate analysis of variance by canonical analysis.

DAY 4
8) Forward selection of environmental variables in RDA.
9) Spatial modelling: Origin of spatial structures. Multi-scale modelling of the spatial structure of ecological communities (PCNM). Extensions: MEM, AEM. Test of space-time interaction in repeated surveys.

DAY 5
10) Spatial structure functions: correlograms, variograms. Control for spatial autocorrelation in tests of species-environment relationships.
11) Cartographic interpolation, kriging.
12) Spatial variation partitioning: canonical analysis or Mantel test?
13) Discussion of study cases presented by participants.

Afternoons, days 1-4 Practicals about these topics using the R language:

• Introduction to the R statistical language (file: Introduction_to_R.pdf)
• Practicals in the R language: Basic matrix operations (file: Basic_matrix_operations.pdf)
• Practicals using the R statistical language (file: Practicals_in_R.pdf)

There is no charge for this course, but registration is essential. To register please contact:

Associate Professor Anas Ghadouani
Aquatic Ecology and Ecosystem Studies
School of Environmental Systems Engineering
The University of Western Australia
35 Stirling Highway, M015
Crawley, Western Australia
E-mail: [email protected]
Phone: +61-8-6488-2687
Fax: +61-8-6488-1015