Welcome to Module 4: Morphology!

When What
Aug 09 Day 3: Disparity & traitspace
Aug 10 Day 4: Phylogenetic comparative methods
  + bonus Open science discussion


Day 5: Disparity & traitspace

with Thomas Guillerme (University of Sheffield)

Schedule

From To Details
9:30 10:00 Intro with a coffee
10:00 11:30 Part 1: from traits to traitspaces
11:30 12:00 Part 2: from traitspaces to disparity (1)
12:00 13:00 Lunch
13:00 14:00 Part 2: from traitspaces to disparity (2)
14:00 16:00 Part 3: from disparity to macroevolution

Don’t worry to much if it looks packed without much coffee breaks, they are designed within in each part to refresh your brain cells and move around a bit!

Content

Everything is available here. But here’s a run down of what we are going to cover:

Part 1:

Theory:

  • morphological traits
  • ordination: PCA and PCO (incl. distance matrices).

Skills:

  • reading trait data into R.
  • ordinating data into R.

Part 2:

Theory:

  • what is disparity?
  • the multidimensional nightmare.
  • reducing dimensionality
  • mechanisms, processes and patterns in biology

Skills:

  • an intro to the dispRity package
  • measuring disparity
  • reducing dimensionality
  • choosing and testing disparity metrics.

Part 3:

Theory:

  • testing hypotheses with disparity
  • testing hypotheses through time
  • simple disparity models
  • phylogenetic comparative methods and disparity? [teaser for the next day]
  • disparity of disparity analyses

Skills:

  • comparing disparity between groups
  • comparing disparity through time
  • disparity-through-time (dtt) analyses
  • disparity study design

Phylogenetic comparative methods & Open Science: August 10

with Thomas Guillerme & Emma Dunne

Schedule

From To Details
10:00 11:00 Part 1: Intro to PCMs
11:00 11:15 Coffee break
11:30 12:00 Part 1: PCMs in R
12:00 13:00 Lunch
13:00 15:00 Part 2: Best practices in open science


Purpose

  • Introduction to phylogenetic comparative methods (PCMs)
  • Example analyses in R using bespoke packages
  • Exploration of morphological trait evolution

Code and files