W01-1: Project Working

For this project, you are supposed to gather together in small groups and deploy your technical knowledge from the previous week in order to find adequate solutions for a set of land cover and species composition-related topics. The questions to be dealt with here all focus on the island of Fogo and the data sets we have been dealing with in the previous week. They can be roughly formulated as follows:

Day 1 Data: Get it here

Day 2 Data: Get it here

Extent of Fogo: c(765000,795000,1638000,1667000)

1. General land cover and species characteristics
   1. Does terrain characteristics (eg. exposition, slope) correlate with land cover, ie. are there major differences between single land covers?
   2. Does the species composition (eg. amount of different species) vary between major land covers?
2. Endemic vs. introduced species
   1. Are there any differences in terms of amount of introduced species between single land covers? (columns 'NIntroduced' and 'NNatural')
   2. Do introduced species predominantly occur in close vicinity to settlements (and, vice versa, more endemic species in remote areas)?

Of course, staff members will be around to provide general guidance and help you address any kinds of technical (ie. R and QGIS-related) issues. However, this group work is first and foremost intended for you to

• work independently, ie. without permanent input from a lecturer,
• develop a concept together with your group members that is suitable to address a particular topic in a given amount of time (more precisely, within two days),
• and subsequently put this concept into action.

Considering that some of you are already considerably experienced in R, whereas others have quite some previous knowledge in QGIS, it would be highly advantageous to equip each group with at least one these experts. The following split represents a possibly solution for how to reasonably distribute our (self-assessed) experts among numerous groups that should ideally consist of three to four people:

• Group 1: Name of the participants
• Group 2: Name of the participants
• Group 3: Name of the participants
• Group 4: Name of the participants
• Group 5: Name of the participants
• Group 6: Name of the participants
• Group 7: Name of the participants
• Group 8: Name of the participants

Finally, please note that there are eight groups, but only four different topics. In other words, there are always two groups working on one and the same research question. Since we are not in school here, we highly encourage you to talk to your colleagues at the end of the day, thereby discussing your ideas, concepts and also problems that you will likely encounter during this do-it-yourself session. In the end, each pair of groups are supposed to give a short presentation on the approach they have chosen, meaning that you are ultimately forced to talk to each other either way - so why not just start right away!