Lisbon - Portugal

Course description: understanding the interrelations between form, function and evolution is a major goal in organismal biology. The biological discipline concerned with quantifying organismal form is Morphometrics. In the last two decades, the development of digital imaging technology and of a statistical framework for the analyses of anatomical landmarks have converged to give rise to a renewed and powerful approach to study organismal form, Geometric Morphometrics.

This workshop aims to serve as a starting point to those biologists interested in the study of organismal form. To this end the basic theoretical concepts as well as the basic applied tools to perform a geometric morphometric analysis of a biological structure will be presented. The workshop will consist of theoretical classes, where the main concepts and procedures will be explained, and practical sessions in the computer room to put them in practice. In the practical sessions we will work with two dimensional landmarks obtained from digital images.

 

 

Programme

 

Theoretical session

- What is morphometrics?

• A brief historical introduction

• Traditional and Geometric Morphometrics

• Why study form?

 

- Basic concepts: form, shape and size

- Data acquisition

• Landmarks

• Equipment

• Scaling and Measurement Error

 

- Extracting size and shape from coordinates

• Centroid Size

• Symmetric and Asymmetric components of shape

 

- Visualizing shape changes

 

 

Practical session

 

- Getting started

- Data acquisition

- Building the project

• Classifiers and Covariates

• Outliers detection

 

- The Procrustes Fit and the Procrustes ANOVA

 

Theoretical session

- Looking at the structure of variation: Principal Component Analysis

- Distinguishing groups: Canonical and discriminate analyses

- Regression: the especial case of allometry or size-dependent shape changes

- Other information enclosed in the form of biological structures

• Asymmetry

• Integration and Modularity

 

Practical session

 

- Principal Component Analysis

- Allometry and size correction

- Canonical and discriminate analyses

- Asymmetry

- Phenotypic Integration and Modularity