Giovanni Sanna

The 7th edition of the course ‘Geometric Morphometrics in R’ took place in the small town of Capellades, in the Barcelona province, Spain, from 20 to 24 January 2020. It was offered by the company Transmitting Science through the excellent coordination of Dr. Soledad De Esteban-Trivigno, and taught by the expert Dr. Julien Claude (author of the book ‘Morphometrics with R’).

The focus of the course was on the use of the R software environment to perform quantitativeand statistical analyses of biological shape and size. Being an advanced course, basic experience with both geometric morphometric concepts and R was required. Therefore, after some brief general introduction on the R environment, we quickly plunged into the analyses using various packages and functions.

Overall, the course was very practice-oriented and all theoretical explanations were rapidly accompanied by direct use of code on real datasets. All five days of course were similarly structured, with lessons in the morning, lunch break, more lessons in the afternoon, and some time to discuss with the  instructor individual problems at the end of the day. This latter part was a great chance to directly apply what we learned to our research questions.

I believe the course has been very useful, both generally – as an advanced training in statistical computing – and specifically – because morphometric analyses are quite relevant to my PhD project. Some extra individual work is certainly needed to assimilate all the information and get familiar with all the analyses, but I am left with a much stronger background. However, the value of the course did not only lie in its lessons. I had the chance to meet several researchers with obvious shared interests, but also from disparate fields, working on a broad variety of fossil and living organisms. The venue deserves a special mention: participants,
coordinator, and instructor were hosted all together in an evocative rural house, over 500 years old, set in the calm Spanish countryside. Course, meals, and accommodation were all based here. This enabled us to better know each other and share our experiences during our free time, while enjoying some nice Spanish cuisine and wine.

I would like to thank GLOMAR for financially supporting my participation in this course.