Surveys of the marine environment need to be converted into data products that are useful for marine management. One such product is the “biotope” map, a map of the environment categorised into areas with similar community and environmental conditions (or “habitats”). Such maps can show which biotopes are rare, inform understanding of ecosystem functions, and generally inform knowledge-based sustainable management for industrial development and conservation.
This three day workshop will give you a broad background in the concepts and methods behind generating biotope maps, and will walk you through an example workflow based on methods currently being used by MAREANO, Norway’s national seabed mapping programme.
You will learn cluster analysis techniques for biotope classification, random forest modelling techniques for predictive mapping (and potentially others if time allows), and evaluation methods for assessing your predictions and communicating uncertainty.
You can be a complete beginner at modelling methods to take this course, but all analyses will be performed in the R software environment (with R studio), so a basic level of R coding knowledge is necessary to make the most of this course. Scripts and data will be provided.
The workshop will be held in English.
MSc students to researchers.
Rebecca is a deep-sea benthic ecologist and modeller. Her career is generally focussed on applied marine ecology – producing scientific results that support sustainable evidence-based marine management. This includes experience in deep-sea survey and analytical methods development, video analyses, species/habitat distribution modelling, larval dispersal modelling, biotope classification, and vulnerable marine ecosystem definition.
She is currently a researcher at the Institute of Marine Research in Bergen, Norway and working primarily on the Norwegian national mapping project, MAREANO.
Jonatan Fredricson Marquez, PhD
Jonatan is a marine biologist who specializes in spatial analyses and mapping. His current work focuses on developing different types of maps of the marine benthos to aid management and conservation strategies, such as maps of habitat, biotopes, or other management units. He is familiar with a range of mapping techniques from regressive and multivariate models to machine learning models.
He currently works as a researcher in the benthic communities research group at the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research where he is involved in the MAREANO project, as well as other projects related to nature accounting, natur-i-norge, and regional benthic mapping.
Must have some working knowledge of R software environment.
If you have any doubts please contact: twindeeps@ciimar.up.pt
Registration is free and can be completed through this link.
A maximum of 20 participants will be selected for the workshop, considering their motivation and the potential impact of the workshop in their careers.
The registration deadline is October 31, 2025.
Organized by CIIMAR and IMR (Norway), in scope of the TwinDEEPS (a Horizon Europe project, funded in scope of the Widening programme (Grant Agreement no. 101160298).
