About the Course: 

The Endangered Species Recovery (ESR) course is a two week introduction to the issues and practical skills involved in saving threatened species from extinction. You will develop a critical understanding of biodiversity conservation and the issues it raises, as well as practical research skills.

Duration: 6 weeks

Time Commitment: 3 hours/week

Organised in partnership with UNEP, the main objective of the Executive Summer School (ESS) on Global Environmental Policy is to provide professionals with a broad training programme in order to bridge the common gap between scientific knowledge and professional expertise related to core environmental themes.

This two-week course is designed to capitalize on this expertise to teach conservation professionals and field scientists the most current methods in the research of bird migration including theoretical concepts, field and laboratory methods, data analysis and applied conservation strategies.

This course engages conservation professionals in developing skills, approaches, and solutions applicable to the assessment and monitoring of wild mammal populations including bats and terrestrial mammals of all sizes. The course will progress from components of study design to field data collection, data analysis, and the application of results to conservation and management.

Course participants work to open a mist-net for field sampling of local bats. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Creative Services/George Mason University

The curriculum includes:

Animal movement is critical for maintenance of ecosystem services and biodiversity. The study of complex movement patterns and of the factors that control such patterns is essential to inform conservation research and environmental management. Technological advances have greatly increased our ability to track, study, and manage animal movements. But analyzing and contextualizing vast amounts of tracking data can present scientific, computational, and technical challenges that require scientists and practitioners to master new skills from a wide range of computational disciplines.