Ecological Monitoring
This course is about ecological monitoring, an essential aspect of protected areas management. Following this 4-module MOOC, you will acquire a good basis on what monitoring is and how it should be conducted. What is it meant for, which methods and techniques should be chosen, why, how to implement them? What are the statistical tools that you should know about to implement a good monitoring? Finally, the course provides practical examples of monitoring conducted in different environments and targeting different species, going from theory to practice.
MOOC Syllabus
Module 1: Ecological monitoring and its design
1.2 Why do we monitor?
1.3 What is ecological monitoring?
1.4 What is it for?
1.5 Values and ecological attributes
1.6 Which method to use?
1.7 Which sampling method should be used?
1.8 Effective monitoring at the best cost
1.9 Data collection and analysis
1.10 Planning and ecological monitoring
Module 2: Statistics
2.2 General notions of statistics
2.3 Numerical summaries
2.4 Graphical summaries
2.5 Population distribution models
2.6 Point estimation
2.7 Confidence intervals
2.8 Hypothesis test
2.9 The Jolly method
Module 3: Techniques
3.2 Ecology basics (part 1)
3.3 Ecology basics (part 2)
3.4 Monitoring an environment’s abiotic factors
3.5 Monitoring plant biodiversity
3.6 Large mammals: direct monitoring
3.7 Large mammals: indirect monitoring
3.8 Monitoring carnivores
3.9 Monitoring primate populations
3.10 Aerial count
3.11 Monitoring mobile animals
Module 4: Examples of ecological monitoring
4.2 Scales of EM
4.3 EM NRT Conservancies
4.4 SE example: Nazinga Game Ranch in Burkina Faso
4.5 Marine protected areas
4.6 EM in a forest environment: Taï National Park in Côte d’Ivoire
4.7EM example in the savanna: Comoé National Park (CNP) in Côte d’Ivoire
4.8 Monitoring waterbird populations
4.9 EM elephants
4/10 Twenty golden rules
Course team
There are five main instructors presenting this course:
Geoffroy Mauvais (IUCN-Papaco), Béatrice Chataigner (IUCN-Papaco), Emmanuel HEMA (Ouagadougou University - Burkina Faso), Inza Koné (Félix Houphouët-Boigny University - Côte d'Ivoire) and Victor Panaretos (EPFL - Switzerland).
Practical information
Follow this course online, on this platform, at your own pace.
Duration: 40 hours of work online and offline (this is an estimate, the reality depends on each student).
Price: free (including the attestation).