EBIO5460 Fundamentals of Data Science for Ecology and Evolution Fall 2025
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Colorado, Boulder
Instructor: Dr Brett Melbourne
Pronouns: he, him, his
Syllabus
Timetable: what topics when
Location: Ramaley N183, Tue/Thu 3:30 - 4:45
Zoom 944 3049 7046, as needed, and for office hours (log in with CU account)
Piazza: Get help, ask and answer questions, discuss topics
Google Drive: texts and reading that are not open access
Class recordings: password required, by request
This repository includes lecture slides (pdf), code, and homework instructions. For the most part, where code is concerned you want to view the markdown (.md) files in your web browser from GitHub.com. These markdown files are more readable and are compiled from the corresponding R or Python literate programming scripts. You can also run the R or Python code on your computer from the .R or .py files. For C code, you'll need to compile it to run.
This is the first semester in a four-semester, PhD-level Data Science for Ecology sequence:
- Semester 1: Fundamentals of Data Science for Ecology and Evolution
- Semester 2: Machine Learning for Ecology and Evolution
- Semester 3: Process Modeling with Data for Ecology and Evolution
- Semester 4: Hierarchical models for Ecology and Evolution More information on the 4 semester sequence is here.
This first semester introduces all the fundamental skills and concepts, with examples from topics in later semesters. Spring 2025 was a major revision focusing on covering all the fundamentals, introducing new tooling (Positron, Quarto), expanding to multiple languages (C, Python, R), and expanding on data generating processes and data simulation as the foundation of data science in science.