BioInspired! So What? Now What!

A geometric morphometrics course will be delivered by Prof. Chris Klingenberg at the Scottish Center for Ecology and the Natural Environment (SCENE) form May 12th-16th 2014. Geometric morphometrics is a very good tool for analyzing shapes, structures and evolutionary data relating to shape. For more details on the course or this approach to analysis please visit http://www.prstatistics.co.uk.

Prof. Chris Kligenberg will be delivering the course, Chris is a professor at Manchester University and designed/wrote the software morphoJ (http://www.flywings.org.uk/MorphoJ_page.htm) and specialises in geometric morphometrics and analysing evolutionary data sets based on shape change. The software is used a lot in in plant biology, evolutionary biology, functional morphology palaeontology, etc. and can really be applied to many different fields. It allows comparison of shapes, images, structures in either two or three dimensions. This type of analysis is well suited to analysing evolutionary and functional morphology data, population dynamics, anything that can be compared using shape or physical characteristics.

The course will take students across the complete process involved with preparing and analysing shape data. There will be a background explaining the history and principles behind geometric morphometrics. It will cover the basics of data acquisition and the most productive method to digitise landmarks using software TPSdig and TPSutil as well as others. Cover in detail how to extract and visualise shape changes from your images. Identify where variation is in your samples using Principle Component Analysis, how to export, for example PC scores to be analysed further in, for example, R. Compare the amount of variation between groups using Discriminant Function and Canonical Variance Analysis). How covariation, using regression, can be used to size correct data i.e. to remove the effect of allometry or unwanted shape variation. Modularity, Partial Least Squares and mapping shape change with phylogeny (to compare across species/families) will also be covered before a final overview of how these different types of analysis can be used to answer hypothesis.
 
The course is delivered to participants by working through exercises and examples which specifically give good insight as to how you might answer or formulate questions about your own data so is both lecture style and practical.