Instructors: Dr. Alex Zizka (iDiv) and Dr. Daniele Silvestro (University of Lausanne, Switzerland)

The public availability of large-scale species distribution data has increased drastically over the last ten years. In particular, due to the aggregation of records from museums and herbaria, and citizen science in public databases such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This is leading to a ‘big data’ revolution in biogeography, which holds an enormous but still poorly explored potential for understanding large scale patterns and drivers of biodiversity in space and time… this is super exciting!!!