The course will cover the basics of ecological study design with a short 2 week project where students will design a study and collect data. Following this, they will learn the various approaches to analyse such data, paying attention to the many pitfalls of making incorrect assumptions, and issues with inadequate data. Students will be able to identify the distributions underlying their data, and choose appropriate analytical tools. This course is designed to be a hands-on course where students will use both data collected as part of the course, and that from published datasets, to run analysis. All analysis will be done using the statistical software R, which they will be familiar with from a previous course (prerequisite).