Biodiversity Diagnoses Course in Benin

The concept behind this course is to take some next steps in combining the content and ideas of several previous BITC courses: data capture, data cleaning, data analysis, etc. The idea is to analyze a set of data sets in parallel as regards a series of questions of interest. The data sets will be significant, original, regional summaries of the occurrence and diversity of major taxa: e.g., “birds of Zimbabwe,” “plants of the Ethiopian Highlands,” “frogs of the Congo Basin,” etc. The expectation is that these data sets will be substantive and significant: that is, more than just a download of GBIF-enabled data records. The trainees in this course will work closely with a team of four experts in developing a standard set of analyses, as well as analyses specific to the particular taxon and region. Analyses will be summarized in the form of research papers and published as a set of papers in a special issue of Biodiversity Informatics (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi).