Course Material

Literature

The following papers give a good introduction to the topic and should be read before the course:

• Jager T, Heugens EHW, Kooijman SALM. 2006. Making sense of ecotoxicological test results: Towards application of process-based models. Ecotoxicology 15: 305-314. (PDF)
• Ashauer R, Escher BI. 2010. Advantages of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic modelling in aquatic ecotoxicology and risk assessment. Journal of Environmental Monitoring 12:2056-2061. (PDF)

Refresher on differential equations and likelihood functions can be found here: refresher.pdf 

 

Further literature about toxicokinetic/ toxicodynamic modelling and DEBtox, can be found here www.debtox.info

 

Modelling program

Within the course we will use the program MATLAB. As soon as the participant has payed the course fees he/ she will receive an ID, which is required for the download of MATLAB. All students have to bring their own laptop. Please install the program on your laptop and go through the MATLAB tutorials and exercises before the course starts

 

If you are new to MATLAB, make sure you start with the first four chapters of the MATLAB tutorial. Make sure you learn how the MATLAB environment works, how to write a script, how to work with matrices, how to make simple plots, and how to work with operators such as "if" statements and "for" loops. This means at minimum most of the Chapters 1 and 2, only the most basic plotting functions of Chapter 3, only "flow control" and the basics of "scripts and functions" of Chapter 4. Note that the time needed for this is on top of the preparation time noted in the work load of the course!

Some exercises will be provided to develop your MATLAB skills and to introduce a few basic theoretical concepts (these exercises are part of the preparation workload).

After the course, if you do not have access to MATLAB, you can download the freeware Octave, which has roughly the same capabilities (but lacks the effective editor, help function and debugger of MATLAB).

Now online:  Pre-Course Homework and MATLAB exercises

A schedule for the work, which should be done before the course, including further reading, information on how to learn Matlab, and Matlab exercises can be found here http://www.debtox.info/board/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=41

 

 

Discussion forum

The DEBtox discussion board contains a dedicated sub-forum for the course for discussions and asking questions.

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