JRS’ grantee, the Kansas University Biodiversity Institute announces the fourth course in its Biodiversity Informatics Training Curriculum series, “Biodiversity Diagnoses” to be held 1-9 September 2014, in Cotonou, Benin.

The concept behind this course is to take some next steps in combining the content and ideas of several previous BITC courses: data capture, data cleaning, data analysis, etc. The idea is that participants will analyze regional biodiversity data sets in parallel as regards a series of questions of interest. The data sets will be significant, original, regional summaries of the occurrence and diversity of major taxa (e.g., “birds of Zimbabwe,” “plants of the Ethiopian Highlands,” “frogs of the Congo Basin,” etc.) that they have assembled. The expectation is that these data sets will be substantive and significant: that is, more than just a download of GBIF-enabled data records.

The trainees in this course will work closely with a team of four experts in developing a standard set of analyses, as well as analyses specific to the particular taxon and region. Analyses will be summarized in the form of research papers and published as a set of papers in a special issue of Biodiversity Informatics (https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jbi). More details on this course, as well as the application form, are available at http://goo.gl/eLTEJK. Address any questions to BiodivTraining@gmail.com.