Statistical Exploration and Measurement of Biodiversity with R

Summer/Autumn 2026

Dr Sébastien Ollier, UNIL

Dr. Sébastien Ollier, UNIL
Tristan Klaftenberger, UNIL

Participants will learn the main concepts associated with the measurement of 'diversity' in ecology and evolution. We will explore diversity indexes (richness, Simpson, Shannon, Rao, Entropy) used to evaluate the diversity of communities from functional to phylogenetic ones. We will see how to decompose this diversity in space or time. We will explore ordination methods to visualize pattern of diversity using multivariate methods especially dedicated to diversity exploration. We will illustrate these concepts on different examples from multiple fields (ecology of communities, climatic niche studies, traits analysis, landscape genetics).
Students will learn how to use the main packages to analyse diversity in R (adiv, entropart, iNext, vegan, betapart, hypervolume, BAT and FD). They will be trained using case studies coming from literature. The course will be organized around three topics: - Indexes of diversity: definition and estimation (3h of course and 3h of practice) - Decomposition of diversity indexes (3h of course and 3h of practice) - Ordination of diversity using multivariate framework (3h of course and 3h of practice) Basic knowledge of R and statistics is required. Participants must come with their laptops with the last version of R installed.

UNIL

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