As human activities transform our land, atmosphere, and oceans, there is an increasing need to utilize large and disparate data sets to predict how ecosystems will respond to and influence future environmental change. Enormous amounts of data are accumulating about the Earth’s natural and managed ecosystems that can be leveraged to improve system understanding, forecast future changes, and inform conservation and management decisions. The EEI Certificate will provide students enrolled in graduate programs across NAU’s campus (e.g., biology, ecology, natural science, forestry, environmental science, and potentially computer science, statistics, and business) with important and useful informatics skills, while enhancing their research and career paths. EEI certificate students take 13 - 15 credits distributed among 4 skill-based “cores”: statistics (3 credits), computing (3 credits), modeling skills (3 - 4 credits), ecological/environmental applications (3 - 4 credits), and synthesis (1 credit). The statistics, computing, modeling skills, and ecological/environmental application cores consist of courses aimed at building students’ skills in these respective areas. Through the synthesis core, students will be exposed to a broad range of disciplines that apply informatics tools to ecological and environmental questions (e.g., research seminars given by speakers from within and outside NAU), in addition to learning key 21st century “soft” skills (related to communication, collaboration, and professional development) that complement the hard skills learned in the other core areas. Show less