Teaching
Undergraduate courses (UFMS)
Bioestatística — Ciências Biológicas
Disciplina obrigatória de 68 h ministrada anualmente no INBio/UFMS, cobrindo estatística descritiva, delineamento amostral, distribuições de probabilidade, inferência via teste de hipóteses e modelos lineares (t, ANOVA, regressão, qui-quadrado).
Urban Ecology — Ciências Biológicas
Disciplina optativa de 51 h para alunos de graduação em Ciências Biológicas. Cobre biodiversidade urbana, fragmentação de hábitats, ilha de calor, respostas ecossistêmicas, invasões biológicas, desigualdade social e “luxury effect”, ambientes aquáticos urbanos, evolução contemporânea, e ciência cidadã (iNaturalist + R). Ofertada em 2019/2 e 2022/2.
Comunidades de ambientes lênticos — Ciências Biológicas
Disciplina optativa de graduação em Ciências Biológicas, ofertada em 2018. Cobre fundamentos de limnologia, características físico-químicas de sistemas lênticos (estratificação, luz, oxigênio, nutrientes), adaptações dos organismos, estrutura de comunidades, dinâmica de metacomunidades, relações tróficas, técnicas de amostragem, introdução à análise multivariada aplicada a comunidades aquáticas e manejo de ambientes lênticos frente às mudanças globais.
History and Philosophy of Science — Ciências Biológicas
Undergraduate seminar course (51 h) offered in 2021/2 for the Biological Sciences (Bacharelado) programme at INBio/UFMS, under the administrative title Tópicos Especiais em Ciências Biológicas VI. Same seminar format as the graduate version — student pairs lead the discussion of weekly readings — but with introductory readings (Chalmers, French, Rubem Alves, Dutra, O Mundo de Sofia, Sagan). Covers epistemology, rationalism vs empiricism (Descartes, Hume, Kant), scientific theories, Popper, Kuhn, asking good scientific questions, and pseudoscience.
Estatística Descomplicada — YouTube channel
I run a YouTube channel — Estatística Descomplicada — with lessons on statistics aimed at biologists and other life-scientists. The content mirrors what I teach in graduate and undergraduate courses at UFMS: Generalized Linear (Mixed) Models, multivariate methods, study design, and the reproducible-analysis workflow in R.
Topics covered include hypothesis testing, GLM/GLMM with appropriate error families, ordinations (PCA, NMDS, RDA, CCA), classification, and how to read statistical results in the ecological literature without getting lost in the jargon. New videos are released as the academic semester progresses.
Graduate courses (UFMS)
Introduction to R
Intensive graduate course (30 h, one-week format) for the PPG in Ecology & Conservation at UFMS. Covers R from scratch: syntax, RStudio, data import, tidyverse (dplyr, tidyr, purrr, broom), data visualization with ggplot2, simple linear models, basic programming, version control with git/GitHub, and reproducible reports with R Markdown / Quarto. Designed for students arriving at R for the first time.
History and Philosophy of Science
Seminar-style graduate course (45 h) for the PPG in Ecology & Conservation at UFMS. Open to graduate students from any line of research. Covers the structure of scientific theories, induction vs deduction, Popper’s falsifiability, Kuhn’s revolutions, Lakatos’s research programmes, the nature of causality and explanation, holism vs reductionism in biology, and how science differs from pseudoscience. Reading-based discussion sessions led by student pairs.
Multidimensional analyses
Graduate course (45 h) for the Mestrado em Biologia Animal at UFMS, Campo Grande. Covers classification (hierarchical and k-means clustering, IndVal), unconstrained ordination (PCA, PCoA, nMDS, CA), constrained ordination (CCA, RDA, db-RDA, LDA), Mantel/Procrustes/PROTEST, and PERMANOVA — all hands-on in R with the vegan, ade4 and labdsv packages.
Phylogenetic comparative methods
Graduate course (45 h) for the Mestrado em Biologia Animal at UFMS, Campo Grande. Covers Brownian motion, PGLS, ancestral state reconstruction, phylogenetic signal, multi-regime OU models, and multivariate extensions — all hands-on in R. Open to graduate students from any line of research with basic familiarity with phylogenetic inference.
Course site & materials → Mind map summarising the methods →
Past courses & short-courses
2019 — Introduction to Macroevolution & Phylogenetic Comparative Methods (PT)
Short-course given at the III Congresso Paulista de Ciências Biológicas (III CPBio), IBILCE/UNESP (São José do Rio Preto), May 2019. Introduces macroevolution — the evolution of phenotypes above the species level — and the phylogenetic comparative methods used to study it. Four parts: fundamentals of evolution, comparative methods, applied examples from the recent literature, and the lab’s current research lines.
2012 — Mendeley demo, Universidade Federal de Goiás
2011 — Ecological statistics with R
Tópicos em Biologia Animal — Estatística aplicada à ecologia usando o R. A two-week graduate course in Animal Biology at UNESP (São Paulo State University), in collaboration with Thiago Gonçalves-Souza and Fernando R. Silva. We covered Generalized Linear Models, the main multivariate methods, and other ecological tools, using R as the analysis platform.
2009 — Sampling techniques for vertebrates (PT)
Short course (4 h) for undergraduates at UNESP, given as a pre-meeting course at the 4º Simpósio de Biologia Animal. Ricardo Brassaloti and I covered field sampling techniques for the four classes of vertebrates.
Recommended bibliography
- Colwell, R.K. & Coddington, J.A. 1994. Estimating terrestrial biodiversity through extrapolation. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 345:101–118. PDF
- Dias, S.C. 2004. Planejando estudos de diversidade e riqueza: uma abordagem para estudantes de graduação. Acta Scientiarum 26:373–9. PDF
- Gotelli, N. & Colwell, R.K. 2001. Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness. Ecology Letters 4:379–391. PDF
- Sutherland, W.J. (Ed.) 2006. Ecological census techniques: a handbook. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press.