CPD - Field Study Design
Date and time
Location
Web Based
Description
Continuing Professional Development course – STUDY DESIGN
IBIS is offering a Continuing Professional Development course covering study design for aquatic science practitioners.
This page is set up for you to register your interest in the CPD.
The course will be taught formally with lectures and coursework (for submission and assessment) based on the lecture material. Meeting aims of sustainability and lowest carbon footprint, the lectures will be delivered online.After registering your interest and upon confirmation of availability, you will be sent a web link to the course location and a password to logon and view video of a prepared lecture with PowerPoint presentations. After the presentation you will download coursework for completion and return to the course provider for review and assessment.
Course Outline
The course will be run by Marine Monitoring Solutions in partnership with the IBIS project.
The course is designed for technicians, students, research assistants and field practitioners who have some experience of aquatic biology from academic study, field and laboratory work, or both.
There is no specific pre-requisite understanding required for the course. However, for general background reading we recommend the following book:
Ruxton, G. & Colgrave, N. (2006) Experimental Design for the Life Sciences, 3rd Edition (2010), 200 pp.
The aim of the course is to provide a refresher on the basics of study design that are pertinent to marine and freshwater biology.
In particular, the course will focus on understanding how to make inferences about populations of aquatic animals through sampling. The participants will gain an enhanced understanding of how the following factors act in concert to define the requirements of a study: variability in the biological system of interest; methodological limitations in data collection; what the study is required to detect; sample size.
In addition, participants will learn to identify common mistakes including: pseudo-replication; Type-I and Type-II error; sampling bias; confounding.
The course will be available from 18th June 2015 and students must complete and have submitted all course work by 26th June 2015.
To get to grips with the topics, participants will be given lectures followed by exercises.
In the exercises, participants will: create and interpret data plots; calculate various statistics from data; critically assess basic and complex study designs from reports and peer-reviewed publications; design new studies to answer specific questions.
Participants will require a computer with Microsoft Excel installed. All learning materials will be provided during the course.
In the event of oversubscription, IBIS reserves the absolute right to select participants as it sees fit in order to best meet the objectives of the programme.
Organised by
IBIS is a partnership between the Loughs Agency (Lead Partner), the University of Glasgow and Queen's University Belfast. It has created an £8m cross-border project to help protect aquatic resources across Northern Ireland, the Border Region of Ireland and Western Scotland.
Funded from August 2011, IBIS will deliver 70 years of applied research in doctoral and masters projects, 16 Continuing Professional Development courses and 12 Knowledge Transfer workshops by June 2015 - leaving a legacy of expertise in sustainable aquatic resources management in the three jurisdictions.
For details of the suite of research projects operated by IBIS, please go to www.loughs-agency.org/ibis
Research, education and training are provided at SCENE (the Scottish Centre for Ecology and the Natural Environment, University of Glasgow) on Loch Lomond and at the Marine Laboratory in Portaferry (Queen's University Belfast).
An IBIS Advisory Group is drawn from the main governmental and non-governmental environmental agencies in Ireland, N.Ireland and Scotland, to help IBIS address the needs of stakeholders, and to complement ongoing and planned work by other organisations.
The ethos of IBIS is to assist environmentally sustainable economic development across the INTERREG IVA area through evidence-based management of aquatic resources. The data generated will enter the public domain through the statutory agencies, be made available to stakeholders through Knowledge Transfer workshops, and published in newsletters and online.
IBIS receives funding of over £6m from the Special EU Progammes Body (SEUPB) that manages the INTERREG IVA Programme under "Priority 2 - Co-operation for a more sustainable cross-border region", which is funded under the European Regional Development Fund and which includes match funding from the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The University of Glasgow and its partners and collaborators are contributing an additional £2m towards the development of the new teaching building at SCENE.
IBIS operates from locations across Ireland, Northern Ireland and Scotland