Natural History Museum to arrange workshop

Pakistan Museum of Natural History (PMNH) in collaboration with Snow Leopard Trust (SLT) is organising a two-day international workshop on "Modern Techniques for the Analysis of Ecological Data" here from September 29. As many as 70 scientists, researchers, wildlife managers, teachers and professors of universities from all over Pakistan are participating in the workshop.
Dr Richard Bischof will be the resource person of the workshop. Dr Bischof is a Research Fellow of Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Norway and an expert in ecological analysis and modeling, said Dr Muhammad Rafique, chief organiser of the workshop in a statement. An increasing professional need to extract objective information from collected data has now been increasingly felt more than ever, said Dr Rafique, adding, research standards in the fields of biology, bio-informatics, and environmental sciences demand high quality data analyses.
He said students, teachers, scientists, professionals and wildlife managers needed to acquire an advanced level of statistical knowledge and data analysis skills to enable them design and implement studies, prepare reports for the projects and handle practical problems in a scientific manner. He said the workshop was aimed at capacity building of the participants in designing ecological studies and analyses of simple to complex ecological data.
Dr Rafique said their target groups were researchers/faculty members from universities across Pakistan and wildlife managers from all wildlife departments of the country. The workshop would provide hands on training on comprehensive statistical software "R-Programme", which is widely used by ecologists. The R-Programme would be used as a base in analysing diverse kinds of ecological analytical techniques starting from some common analytical procedure (mostly regression models).
The workshop would provide an introduction on population dynamics analyses, capture-mark-recapture modeling and survival analysis. This workshop will set the stage for another, more advanced, workshop at a later stage.
Dr Shahzad A. Mufti, Advisor, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology will inaugurate the workshop while Dr Syed Azhar Hasan, Chairman, Pakistan Science Foundation will be the chief guest in the concluding session.