This course will teach you the basic skills of botany. It consists of a mix of lectures and hands-on activities. We will start with an historical overview of modern taxonomy that includes information on plant classification, how to collect plants and how to describe new species. The course will have practical modules on 1) plant collecting, pressing, drying and voucher preparation, 2) making identification keys, 3) botanical drawing, 4) macro-photography, and 5) identification of collected plant material. Outdoor teaching and plant collecting will use the gardens and protected forests of the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG).

This course builds on foundational statistics and covers a range of methods widely used in modern-day ecology and conservation research, starting from simple linear models and generalised linear models, to mixed effects models with grouped random effects, and linear models with covariance structures for random effects that cannot be grouped. Each topic of the curriculum builds upon the previous one, guiding participants from basic to advanced concepts. By the end of the course, participants will gain practical skills to confidently apply these methods to your own research.

This workshop will introduce and debate the background to and progress in cryo-conservation for a range of plant materials, from pollen to seeds. Participants are encouraged to bring their research challenges to discuss.

This workshop introduces participants to the emerging capabilities of LLMs, their relevance to ecological research, and best practices for incorporating them into analytical workflows.

A hands-on training in reproducible Species Distribution and Abundance Modeling using the flexsdm and adm R packages, guiding participants through data preparation, different algorithm fitting, hyperparameter tuning, and output exploration.

Learn about creating online learning modules based on your own research through the OCELOTS network (Online Content for Experiential Learning of Tropical Systems). Working with specialists in pedagogy, interactive data tools, and media, tropical biologists create modules on a user-friendly, open-access platform with multi-lingual capacity.

This session is a training on meta-analysis which usually overcomes the limitations of individual studies by quantitatively synthesizing existing evidence to provide a precise, robust, and reproducible estimate of the true effect, thereby informing reliable conclusions and guiding future research and policy.