Ecological Forecasting and Dynamics: A graduate course on the fundamentals of time series and forecasting in ecology

‘Ecological Forecasting and Dynamics’ is a semester-long course to introduce students to the fundamentals of ecological forecasting & dynamics. This course implements paper-based discussion to introduce students to concepts and ideas and R-based tutorials for hands-on application and training. The course material includes a reading list with prompting questions for discussions, teachers notes for guiding discussions, lecture notes for live coding demonstrations, and video presentations of all R tutorials. This course material can be used either as self-directed learning or as all or part of a college or university course. Individual learners have access to all of the necessary material - including discussion questions and instructor notes - on the website. The course focuses on papers with an open-access or free-to-read version where possible, though some materials still rely on access to closed-access papers. The course is structured around two sessions per week, with most weeks consisting of a one hour paper discussion session and a 1-2 hour session focused on applications in R. R tutorials use publicly available ecological datasets to provide realistic applications. Because the material is organized around content themes, instructors can modify and remix materials based on their course goals and student levels of background knowledge. These course materials have been taught for several years at the authors’ university and have also generated significant online engagement with course videos tens of thousands of times.