The aim of this course is to provide participants with skills to assist them in working with animal movement data including data management and organization, working with large tracking datasets, data exploration, visualization, annotating track data with environmental data and analysis of movement data. The course is also a great opportunity to develop your research network in the field of movement ecology. 

European forests have a central role to play in biodiversity conservation, as is recognized by recent publications and policy documents.

This postgraduate course focuses on how intercropping promotes productivity, resource use efficiency and resilience of agriculture. It will also consider the challenges of making intercropping both technically and economically feasible in modern farming.

In the postgraduate course Chemical Ecology throughout the tree of life, we will focus on how man-made changes to the environment can influence chemical communications within and between microorganisms, plants, herbivores and disease vectors. We will not only focus on how chemical information can be collected and analyzed, but also on the environmental factors that can affect chemical communications and zoom in on the underlying mechanisms of producing and perceiving chemical information. There will also be two hands-on workshops on how to analyze large datasets in the field of chemical ecology.  

Don’t miss out on the fantastic opportunity to meet fellow plant scientists in person and register before 7th June 2026! PE&RC PhD candidates can claim 50% of the fee (€200,-) by submitting an external course subsidy request. 

This one-week course will illustrate how adopting a consumer-resource approach can change our understanding of interactions, and how adaptive processes can be important in understanding both academic and applied problems in ecology.

This seed systems course critically examines the performance and interplay of conservation frameworks, institutions, and stakeholders, with a focus on the opportunities and tensions inherent in integrated approaches and seed systems that support crop conservation.

This course will focus on the fundamental and applied aspects of the ecology and control of vector-borne diseases and their vectors.

This course focuses on theoretical concepts, such as autocatalytic loops and positive and negative feedbacks between organisms in ecological networks as well as the importance of non-trophic interactions by ecosystem engineers.

This postgraduate course focuses on root ecology, and how roots grow, function and interact with the surrounding environment. We will discuss differences and similarities between roots in natural ecosystems and roots of agricultural plants.

This course addresses the interlinked challenges of agriculture and climate change in a holistic manner approaching CSA from various perspectives including animal & plant sciences, politics & governance, and business & finance in an interdisciplinary manner. It will provide participants with an overview of the up-to-date knowledge about CSA, demonstrate the opportunities, challenges and trade-offs. It will provide ample opportunities to network with experts and fellow candidates from around the world in the field of CSA.

Soil ecology, from global patterns to mechanisms that matter. This is the theme for the 9th edition of the international PhD course on Soil Ecology.

In this course, we will provide an overview of theory, concepts and approaches to conserve insects and the design of biodiversity-friendly agricultural landscapes. Aside from updating and deepening your scientific knowledge, this course also offers an excellent opportunity to broaden your network and to interact with world-class scientists in the field.

This course focuses on concepts such as spatial self-organization, scale-free movement, and biophysical interactions at multiple scales. Furthermore, modern techniques to quantify plant and animal movement, analyse animal movement strategies, and model the implications of spatial self-organization in an ecosystem using a relatively simple modelling approach will be introduced.

In this course, we will thus approach Resource Use Efficiency at three different levels: the soil and plant level, the field level and the farm level.

This post-graduate course focusses on just that. Crop models refer to models that deal with crops, contrasting with e.g. virtual plant models that are focussing on interactions between individual plants. Together with international senior scientists in crop modelling, participants will take up the challenge to acquaint themselves with the process of crop modelling and to develop new insights to strengthen current crop models.

In this course, we will present and discuss the adaptive capacity of plant physiological traits to counter the changing environment. 

The focus of this edition of the FSRLA course is on farm household systems in multifunctional landscapes, as affected by poverty, pressures of climate change, population growth, land-use change, and changes in markets. 

During this course, the participants become acquainted with different resilience concepts and their application from an interdisciplinary perspective. Accordingly, we will address how resilience theory can be used to tackle fundamental and societal issues from a socio-economic and bio-physical perspective and will provide a critical reflection on the relevance, use, and applicability of the concept of resilience.

This course is intended for those just embarking on genomics within an ecological setting and teaches the fundamentals of the discipline, while concentrating on ecological questions. The course focuses on four topics, each of which is treated by lectures, case studies and participant presentations. 

Conservation science is often focused on understanding and finding ways to mitigate conflicts between humans and nature and to promote reciprocal opportunities and benefits.

This course will be focused on an interdisciplinary approach to learn about the different syndromes of land degradation using Portugal as a case-study. Furthermore, we will look for solutions and sustainable management strategies.

This post-graduate course on Theoretical Ecology will focus on bifurcations in dynamical systems and participants will learn quantitative approaches to assess qualitative changes in biological systems that occur when conditions change. 

Life History Theory deals with species-specific adaptive schemes of the distribution of the reproductive effort over the life of an organism. 

In this post graduate course, we will explore photosynthesis from the chloroplast to the whole-plant canopy level. 

This course focuses on concepts such as spatial self-organization, scale-free movement, and biophysical interactions at multiple scales. Furthermore, modern techniques to quantify plant and animal movement, analyse animal movement strategies, and model the implications of spatial self-organization in an ecosystem using a relatively simple modelling approach will be introduced.

This course addresses the interdisciplinary and multi-scale analysis of the dynamics of land systems, covering the geological, ecological, land use, societal and governance perspectives over different scales of time and space. The main goal of the course is to investigate past and current dynamics of the region and predict possible futures in an inter- / trans-disciplinary context.

This course covers concepts and theory related to phenotypic plasticity and discusses quantitative genetic and molecular approaches. The course is composed of a series of lectures, discussions sessions, working group activities, and a final presentation and debate session on the groupwork output.

This one-week course explores the dynamic interplay between microbiomes and their environments, focusing on their contributions to sustainability.