10-14 March 2025

To foster international participation, this course will be held online

Techniques to explore the evolution of multidimensional traits

 The study of multidimensional traits has become integral to ecological and evolutionary research. These encompass both morphometric (e.g., geometric morphometrics) and non-morphometric (e.g., gene expression across multiple genes) phenotypic traits. While analysing multidimensional phenotypes poses unique challenges compared to univariate traits (e.g., body size), it provides unparalleled insights into the processes producing the diversity of life forms. This course will cover a range of techniques—from widely used methods to more specialized approaches—to examine variation in multidimensional traits at both microevolutionary and macroevolutionary scales.

This five-day course combines lectures and hands-on sessions. Lectures will address both foundational knowledge and its practical applications in research. During hands-on sessions, participants will work with example datasets and will be able to apply their learning to their own data. While the hands-on sessions will primarily use geometric morphometric example datasets, the course will also provide substantial information on applying these techniques to non-morphometric data. To maximize learning, we will use user-friendly software with graphical interfaces whenever possible. However, information on R implementations and scripts will be provided for all techniques.

This course is designed for beginners and intermediate users—researchers who wish to analyze multidimensional phenotypic data (e.g., geometric morphometric data) or those who have started analyses but seek a more structured foundation.