The multi-dimensional nature of biodiversity has made its analysis difficult to carry out and controversial to interpret. This is clearly shown by the ever expanding number of potential metrics capturing different aspects of the concept, with no clear best or true metric of biodiversity. Additionally, many metrics ignore spatial and temporal scale despite the scale-dependent nature of biodiversity. In this workshop, we will review a number of approaches to analyzing changes in biodiversity, and then present and train ecologists to use a new R programming package, mobr, which provides scale-aware assessments of biodiversity. The first half of the workshop will be spent covering the concepts and theory involved in deciphering differing approaches to analyzing biodiversity data, and the second half of the workshop we will provide a hands-on tutorial including analyses of real datasets.

This workshop is designed for ecologists at all career levels with an interest in conducting biodiversity analyses. Participants are not expected to be experts in biodiversity metrics or the free and open source R programming language. Participants should expect to gain: 1) an understanding of the historical developments and trade-offs of different approaches to analyzing biodiversity data, and 2) hands on experience applying this knowledge to real empirical datasets.

All participants must bring their own laptop with R pre­installed. All data files and code for this workshop will be made publicly available on github.com. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own biodiversity datasets to analyze during the tutorial portion of the workshop.