RCPol Training Course: Palynology, Palinoecology and Data Organization in Belém, PA

RCPol Training Course: Palynology, Palinoecology and Data Organization in Belém, PA

From March 27th to 31st, the first RCPol Training Course: Palynology, Palinoecology and Data Organization took place in Belém.

The course was organized by RCPol in partnership with Embrapa, which provided us with the necessary structure to minister and to receive all the participants.

The objectives of the course were to enable students, professors and researchers to use the methodology we use to work with pollen grains during acetolysis, to use the RCPol databases, as well as the tools available on our site.

The course was divided into two modules:

The first module was divided into two parts, where we approached themes related to:

  • Methods of area study: floristic composition, floral morphology of attractive resources to pollinators, vertical stratification of plants, phenology and spatiotemporal distribution of resources.
  • Methods for preparation of exsicates in the herbarium.
  • Methods for preparation of pollen material, where we teach the methodology of acetolysis and preparation of plates to be incorporated into reference collections.
  • Methods for organizing a Pollen Collection.
  • Methods of analysis of the trophic niche and plant-pollinator interaction.

And the last part of module I was a visit to the ITV to know the structure of work, the palynological research projects in development and the reference collection of Carajás.

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The module II was opened to the public and we presented in detail the structure of RCPol:

  • We talked about what is RCPol.
  • What types of data are needed to insert data into our databases.
  • Data organization methods in Google Docs spreadsheets.
  • What is data completeness and data quality.
  • How is the functionality of Interactive Keys systems for species identification?
  • What to do to be a collaborator of RCPol.

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